merge body on mirrored

[mstols]

1. Describe your environment: What is your industry? What is your role in your organization? Describe your stakeholders.
PTC reseller. This idea was send to us by a customer that has previously used similar functionality in another cad package. @mneumueller 

2. What version of Creo Parametric are you currently running?
8.0

3. Describe the problem you are trying to solve. Please include detailed documentation such as screenshots, images or video.
Mirror body geometry and merge it to the same body. This is currently 2 separate operations. First you have to mirror the body and then you have to use the boolean operation to join the bodies.

4. What is the use case for your organization?
When you model half the model you might want to mirror the body for the other half. When you have multiple bodies you want quick way to mirror them to create the other halves of the bodies. You can select the modelname in the tree and then select mirror and it will give you the option to join them or keep them separate, but it will then do it for all the bodies. Sometimes you want to do it just for some bodies.

example image below.

Mirror all bodies except 1 yellow body. First 2 bodies should stay 2 bodies after mirror.

Current method: mirror bodies, merge bodies as separate features

5. What business value would your suggestion represent for your organization?
Faster way to model half the model and then mirror the geometry in the body to finish the part.

[mneumueller]

thanks. Yes that might be a valuable option.
Also:  Have you tried using FMX-Mirror?  If you pick a body from the tree when its surface collector is open, it will auto-apply the "body surfaces" collection rule. 

FMX will just mirror the geometry and attach it to the original body.  I think it accepts surfaces of a single body only, though.

[mstols]

Thanks @mneumueller FMX body surfaces mirror also works. Would still be nice to have it work the same as normal mirror with option to merge. 😉

This will also allow users to add multiple mirror body features to a custom group in the future and switch/resume them all at the same time. ( similar effect to visual mirror)

[S_Edgenear]

Speaking of slight speed improvements without too much programming effort, I think one would also might include the mirror in 2 perpendicular planes, so that we can model a quarter part, and mirror twice in X and Z plane. It was something added recently to Solidworks, if my memory serves me right. It might be computattionaly better and faster to make a single merge operation with the two mirror bodies in each of the planes, than using separate features.