×
INTELLIGENT WORK FORUMS
FOR ENGINEERING PROFESSIONALS

Log In

Come Join Us!

Are you an
Engineering professional?
Join Eng-Tips Forums!
  • Talk With Other Members
  • Be Notified Of Responses
    To Your Posts
  • Keyword Search
  • One-Click Access To Your
    Favorite Forums
  • Automated Signatures
    On Your Posts
  • Best Of All, It's Free!
  • Students Click Here

*Eng-Tips's functionality depends on members receiving e-mail. By joining you are opting in to receive e-mail.

Posting Guidelines

Promoting, selling, recruiting, coursework and thesis posting is forbidden.

Students Click Here

Jobs

creating an array of an array

creating an array of an array

creating an array of an array

(OP)
Fellow NX users. In NX8, is there a new and improved way to perform this function we have done many times in the past as described below? The computer really has to think about this for some time when performing this action and hoping there are alternatives.

We continue to have occasions where we have to create a pattern of a pattern. For example, we have a hole that we need to create a circular pattern of said hole next to each other 15 times over a certain angle. We then need to duplicate this pattern many times around a diameter to create a repeating pattern of these 15 holes. So we end up creating the first circular pattern, then we create another circular pattern selecting the first pattern and the parent hole as the input. It works slowly and not very associative if things change.

Have tried pattern faces which is faster but not much different.

Any other methods anyone has used for cases such as this?

Thanks

RE: creating an array of an array

If you're currently running NX 8.0 and using the new 'Pattern Feature' function, then you're using the latest that we have. Note that for NX 8.5 we've improved the performance of this function so things might run a bit faster once you update to the latest version of NX.

That being said, could you provide at least an image of what it is that you're trying to model since this might help us understand what you're doing and if there might be an alternative workflow?

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

RE: creating an array of an array

OK, I've done two things...

First I measured the update time of your model in NX 8.0.3.4 and then again in NX 8.5.1.3 and as I mentioned earlier, with NX 8.5 we've improved the performance of the Pattern Feature particularly when using the 'Variational' method which in this situation it was necessary. In the case of your example, the time to playback the entire model was decreased by about 30%, on my laptop going from approximately 10 seconds using NX 8.0 down to 7 seconds using NX 8.5.

However, looking at your model I decided to remodel it from scratch taking a different approach. See the attached model, which I created using a combination of Pattern Feature and Instance Geometry. Not only does this model update much faster, 2 seconds versus 10 seconds, it's also 75% smaller in terms of the size of the Part file on the disk.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Engineering Software
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Industry Sector
Cypress, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.

RE: creating an array of an array

(OP)
Interesting. Any change to the model on our end (ie...hole quantities) usually requires an update that takes about 75 sec due to all the holes. And this is a small example...our bigger versions with many more holes take much longer....All users have similar times.

however, updating on your model using the geometry instance takes ~2 sec as you mentioned. Thank you for the feedback. Will will have to investigate rebuilding our models to utilize the geometry instance approach.

RE: creating an array of an array

Granted, I'm not up to the latest versions where Pattern Feature is available to me, but ever since the inception of Instance Geometry, I've not found a case where it couldn't be used exclusively - unless one is seeking the feature callouts in Drafting to be pulled from the feature parameters in Modeling.

John can attest to the fact that I was quite a squeaky wheel about certain things in the past, particularly Mirroring and Arraying bodies and I do not believe I've griped about these two since Instance Geometry was added to NX.

That's the nice thing about NX - usually more than one way to accomplish the same task. I'd encourage all users to try different approaches to achieving the same end result with a model.

Tim Flater
NX Designer
NX 7.5.4.4 MP8
WinXP Pro x64 SP2
Intel Xeon 2.53 GHz 6GB RAM
NVIDIA Quadro 4000 2GB

Red Flag This Post

Please let us know here why this post is inappropriate. Reasons such as off-topic, duplicates, flames, illegal, vulgar, or students posting their homework.

Red Flag Submitted

Thank you for helping keep Eng-Tips Forums free from inappropriate posts.
The Eng-Tips staff will check this out and take appropriate action.

Reply To This Thread

Posting in the Eng-Tips forums is a member-only feature.

Click Here to join Eng-Tips and talk with other members!


Resources