prehighlighting of imported geometry- a sign of weakness ;-)

[eslotty]

RMB "Query select" has nearly become a standard method to dig through a
database- even the largest.... When using other CAD systems, I find
myself trying it even though it's not applicable....



Let's throw some fuel on the fire! When I walk up to a display where the
user has pre-highlighting on, my first impression is "We gotta' rookie
here..."



"Pre-highlighting on" is most definitely a sign of weakness.... Kinda
like "teamwork" 😉



Have a great week!



Eric Slotty

- <">mailto:->

414-362-2552

[jstarkey]

Agreed!

Best regards,
James Starkey

[rrich]

Eric, I think your impression of a Rookie is wrong. I use pre-highlight
nearly 100% of the time and have learned how it works and now it is the best
and only way in my opinion. That is the wonder of Proe/Wildfire/Creo
whatever you call it, you are given multiple ways of doing things. Yes
some seem strange and cumbersome at first, but given a shot they actually do
help. Last week's exercise of little turn intent manager off and make a
hex with as few picks as possible was an eye opener. I tried it and after
struggling to get things to align like in intent manager, I realized that
yes change is good. I fought the intent manager for years, thinking I was
smarter than it and I didn't need it, now I realize it is just a tool and
yes it is a great tool. Also it is amazing how quickly you forget how you
use to do things. Back say in release 13 or 14 I could have made that hex
in my sleep, now I struggled for 10 minutes to do what takes me 30 seconds.
We got a good laugh at our user group meeting in Nov when someone gave a
demonstration of Release 13 running in a virtual PC on Windows NT. I do not
see how we made anything after watching this, but we did, even with
antiquated tools of the day. Really, we did this with pencil and paper
before and we never thought that was a weakness.



Regards,

Ron Rich

[jstarkey]

Eric,

You miss the point that some of us are trying to make. See past posts.

Work on mold extracts and large imported part files, where pre-Highlight tries to highlight the entire part. You turn it off and you are forced into a bunch of extra mouse movement pics into the selection filter to. To perform certain operations or commands. Mapkeys do not seem to offset all the wasted time.

Its my belief that PTC through Pro-Mold and EMX under the bus, with the introduction of Pre-Highlight. Also for those of us working on a lot of large imported parts. This in favor of those working on simple less then 100 feature CAD models.

I would like a config.pro to deal with this issue. Put it back like Pre-WF even if you lose the object action methodology when invloked.

Best regards,
James Starkey

[ptc-1932745]

Agreed. It is more difficult than it needs to be to select features in
complex designs. I have tried to mitigate the problem with layers, but
sometimes you can't get to change layer visibility in the middle of a
command. Also you can't always select items from the tree in the middle
of a command.



The other thing about selecting features / entities I don't understand
is the seemingly random way the action takes place. I would think that
there should be a hierarchy from possibly: part, surface, patch, curve,
edge, line, point, vertex, etc... I understand that now selection may
be based solely on proximity to the cursor, but sometimes invisible
features / edges / vertexes are selected as well.



This is a huge problem in drawing mode.



Like it or not some type of pre-selection highlighting seems to be a
'standard' across many of the current CAD/CAM/CAE systems out there.
Complies with the old realization "It doesn't matter how fast we make
the hardware, software programmers will piss it all away eventually".





Christopher F. Gosnell



FPD Company

124 Hidden Valley Road

McMurray, PA 15317