Use your 3DEXPERIENCE ID to log in.

SS By Shawn Stugard  10/12/18

Assembly visualization!

I was thinking about SW tips that have really had an impact on how I work, and this has got to be in the top 10 for sure. I don't use it every day, or even every month, but when I need it, it’s amazing.

AV can be an absolute lifesaver when you need to hunt down non-conforming parts in an assembly. It is my needle finder when the haystack become unmanageable. I’ll outline a few instances where it has saved the day.

Case #1: Do I look like I put on some weight? I have an assembly with hundreds of parts and my mass seems way off. I setup AV to look at Mass and viola, I can very quickly see that some of the hardware is disproportionately heavy. Change the materials or monkey with the mass properties of the parts and we are back in business without having to look at every single part.

Case #2: Stupid loooong rebuild time. I was working on an off-highway vehicle that at the top level took about an hour to open and was very slow to work with once it did open. I was tasked with speeding things up. So, I used AV to sort by rebuild time, exported to excel and then we had our "most wanted" list to fix. Just dealing with the top 10 worst rebuild times sped things up considerably. I remember one of the worst being a small piece of walkway tread that was modeled with every little detail shown. Just adding a simplified configuration to that part made a world of difference in performance.

Case #3: Custom properties can be verified this way too. Before release of a large weldment (65,000lbs of steel!) it was critical that every component had the appropriate ECN number in the custom properties. AV to the rescue! Set it up to sort by ECN property and boom! All the bad actors are plain to see. Click em, change em, save em, move on.

If anyone else has novel uses for AV I’d love to hear about them.

comments: 0

View or Reply

Use your 3DEXPERIENCE ID to log in.

Looking for answers/comments...