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Disappearing Parts/Assemblies

Disappearing Parts/Assemblies

Disappearing Parts/Assemblies

(OP)
Has anyone experienced their parts or assemblies disappearing now and again from the screen? Since moving to SW 2006 I have encountered this more often where the part/assembly disappears and after you close it down and re-open it, it re-appears. Now I have an assembly that does not appear at all, even after a computer re-start. The design tree comes up but apart from that I simply get the background.

Using a Dell 3Ghz Processor with 1Gb of RAM and an ATI FireGL V3100 Graphics card.

SW 2006 with SP 3.0

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

RE: Disappearing Parts/Assemblies

What Video Card Driver are you using with that card? It's important to be using hte correct driver as well as the card. If you don't know how to get the info, check out the FAQ section here.

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP
www.scottjbaugh.com
FAQ731-376

RE: Disappearing Parts/Assemblies

(OP)
Using the following driver

8.163.1.0 which was released on 09/09/2005.

I was using the driver that came with the card, however it was suggested that I update it to the latest version by our IT guys here, who do not use Solidworks.....

RE: Disappearing Parts/Assemblies

Check out the SW website for your card:

http://www.solidworks.com/pages/services/videocardtesting.html

Fire GL V3200/V3100        
Win2K     8.103.2     06/06/2005     2006      View Notes
WinXP     8.103.2     06/06/2005     2006      View Notes

Try using that driver instead. There is an FAQ on how to install new drivers here as well.

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP
www.scottjbaugh.com
FAQ731-376

RE: Disappearing Parts/Assemblies

(OP)
thanks for that

RE: Disappearing Parts/Assemblies

(OP)
Changed the driver to the one suggested on the SW website but still no joy. Maybe I will have to re-build it. It's fairly big tho.

RE: Disappearing Parts/Assemblies

Have you tried a ctrl-Q?

RE: Disappearing Parts/Assemblies

(OP)
yep, just tried it no luck tho. This is a clean install onto a brand new pc. I installed SP 3.0 straight off instead of doing them incrementally. Although when I was running Sw2006 on my old PC with SP 2.0 I had the same problem and was using a different graphics card. Maybe it's me.

RE: Disappearing Parts/Assemblies

(OP)
It's back!!

With the assembly open I opened the drawing and right clicked on one of the views, selected "open part ...." and it came back. I had tried that on previous occasssions but this time it worked.... eventually.

RE: Disappearing Parts/Assemblies

I had that problem in SW05, but not so much in SW06.  My comp met the specs and a few others here had the same problem, so I attributed it to a bug. 99 percent of the time one of these 2 things worked:  either pic the empty view in the drawing and hit the "shaded with edges" button OR right-click the empty view and open the model.  Only on rare occasions would I have to close SW and re-start it.  

Flores
SW06 SP3.0

RE: Disappearing Parts/Assemblies

Do you have 'Use Large Assembly Mode' check marked under System Options/Assemblies and/or 'Automatically Load Components Lightweight' check marked under System Options/Performance/Assemblies? Having them turned on may be the culprit.

 I've had similar problems this week as well as having my reference sketches within assemblies turn off periodically as I work (and some other nasty 'can't find xxx part' error messages). I'm not 100% sure, but I think it all began when I made my first assembly over 500 parts.

 When Large Assembly Mode turns on for one assembly it seems to stay on and rebuilds any assembly you open after that in Lightweight mode regardless of the number of parts in it.

 In Options I turned off 'Large Assembly Mode' and 'Automatically Load Components Lightweight', reopened the problem assemblies and right-clicked on the assembly name on the first line in the Feature Manager. Click on 'Set Lightweight to Resolved' and it may fix your problem.

I found this out a couple hours ago; I haven't had a part disappear since and all my other problems have gone away.


Hope this helps

Scott Heiden

RE: Disappearing Parts/Assemblies

I've had some disappearing models as well.....if I toggled the "hide all types" under the View dropdown menu then it seemed to be ok for awhile.

RE: Disappearing Parts/Assemblies

i had a similar issue and was told it is a known issue with no fix to date:

i had an assembly cut feature that patterned. then i inserted a toolbox part and when i tried to mate it to any one of those assembly cuts, it dissappeared. it remained in the tree but was not visible on screen.

at any rtate, if this is you issue or related. the solution i used to workaround was to pattern at the sketch level. instead of patterning the feature. slightly more tedious as i wanted to constrain that feature so now i had to constrain each sketch entity separately as opposed to just having the definition in the pattern feature. but it did work and i was able to move on and complete my assembly/drawing.

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