Intent manager

[Dan10]

I'm using Creo and would like to turn off the intent manager like I did in Wildfire 4. Is this still possible? How?

 

[dgs]

I think that option has been disabled starting in Creo.
Intent manager is your friend, you'll come to love it
eventually. Far more control over your sketches.

 

[design-engine]

Dan, why would you want to do that? Please tell me what your thinking!

 

[Dan10]

Question from a co-worker.

 

[dgs]

I worked with a guy who refused to turn it on, felt he was
more productive with it off, had more control of his
sketches. I tried to convince him otherwise. How do you,
for example, explicitly make two entities tangent or colinear or equal in length? You can't, but he would hear
none of it. Some folks just like the way it is and don't
want to learn the new.

I was always fixing up his sketches too, adding in
constraints that he couldn't to capture design intent.

 

[design-engine]

humans in general resist change. Natural trait. I remember not wanting to turn it on. It is my belief Solidworks based it's research on hi-end users that resisted the intent manager, which is which in my opinion one major reason why Solidworks is so behind. And their users don't even know it.

 

[tgsp]

Hey, sometimes old dogs can learn new tricks. Just a few
months ago a colleague of mine, who has been using Pro/E
since rev 11, scheduled me to give him a full evening
tutorial on the intent manager. He had heard that CREO
would not allow you to turn it off and one of his
customers was switching to CREO. I checked back with him
about one month after the tutoring session and he is now
very happy with the intent manager and how smoothly it
works. He won't retunr to his old habits anymore now,
but a good training session was imperative to build his
confidence and understanding on the intent manager.

For the years that I taught Pro/E before the intent
manager was mandatory, I would modify the PTC lesson in a
humorous way. They taught that you followed the 4 basic
steps to sketching, those being "SADR", sketch, align,
dimension and then regenerate. I added another consonant
to the acronym. I made it SADPR, where the P was for
Pray, because unless you were a GURU, praying might just
help with regenerating the sketch

 

[design-engine]

Funny. I turned it off the other day and could do anything

 

[Resendis]

Hi guys. Sorry im late to this party

. I have been on Pro/E since release 15 and HATED the intent manager when if first came out. I too turned it off. Since then, I have realized that the only thing that needed changing was my attitude towards new functionality. Although at times its seems painful, we are creatures of habit and mouse clicks. We are all gurus in our own minds

. Embrace new functionality and this beast will be much easier to tame. Humility goes a long way. . . Now if I can just figure out all the changes to Cabling between WF4 and Creo, Ill be good. Peace!!!

 

[Roger]

I started on Pro/JUNIOR in '96. I struggled with intent manager when it came out. I use it now, when I'm working, and only need to shut it off from time to time. As soon as I get the sketch to regen., then I save it and go back to intent manager. This from the guy who was believing the "Wild Fowl" comments when it first came out, and was pleasantly suprised to see how good it is/was.


I've not had the opportunity to work with CREO, thank you Odumbo, but, am looking forward to it.

 

[dr_gallup]

The early versions of intent manager were C R A P. Plain and simple. I refused to use it for several releases for the simple reason that it did not work. I've been happily using it for many years but every once in awhile I have a problem with a complex sketch and have to turn it off. I think it is a mistake to not give the user the option to turn it off.

 

[dgs]

I adopted it as soon as it was available and found it an
immense improvement. Simply being able to define my own
constraints was miles ahead of the 'sketch it close, regen
and pray Pro/E assumes what you want' of the old sketcher.

 

[jkiersh1]

I know I am resurrecting an old thread but this is the closest thing I can find to the problem I am having.
I am new to Creo 2 but not to modeling. I am in the sketcher and the intent manager is putting dimensions and constraints in places that are not helpful. I get that it is how it is supposed to work but I cannot add dimensions where I need them to control the sketch and remove the ones I don’t need. I can add remove constraints but that is only partially helpful. It will not let me lock or even change the dimensions that it adds. Any help here will be greatly appreciated as I need to come up to speed as quickly as possible.

 

[tobbo]

Regarding the dimension set by intent manager - You should be able to change them, but you cant remove them. When you add your own dimensions, the dim set by default should disappear automatically.

Are your sketch too complicated ? (many enteties?) Do you have the same problem if you create a sketch of an rectangle? You can also try to set the selectionfilter (bottom right on the screen) to "dimension", and select all dims that is set by intent manager and then RMB - modify. Then you got a new dialogbox that will let you change dims (one by one) by "scrolling a wheel" (or all at the same time if you use "lock scale"), perhaps you can get a hint of why you cant change your dimensions? . ( what i mean is that your sketch might not allow some dims to be set because it will make it corrupt, so try modify a "intent manganer dim" by scrolling the wheel)


Regarding the constrains, use rmb to lock or unlock the constrains suggested by creo when you are in sketchermode and drawing your lines. You can also use shiftkey (and rmb click) to "remove" the suggested constrain.

(sorry for my bad english....)

//Tobias

 

[jkiersh1]

Not being able to change some of the dimensions set by the IM is one point of frustration that is not consistent. Sometimes I can other times I change it and it ignores the change (number does not change). I did figure out what I was doing wrong when trying to add a dimension. In this case I had a line at an angle. I could not pick the line I needed to pick the two endpoints and CMB to locate the dimension. RMB also does not always give me the option to modify so I take that as I am not understanding the order of operations. Some of the sketches are complicated but they were not my doing. I have since done away with some of them and recreated the geometry feature by feature. I don’t see a thing called selection filter but there is a search tool is that the same thing?
Oh and your English is fine.

 

[dgs]

I've always found that sketching works best when I exaggerate or distort my sketches first, then apply the dims and constraints I want. Get the right type of entities in but put them out of the way so Creo doesn't assume too much that'll be hard to change. I almost never sketch directly on references, even if I want the sketch entities aligned later.

That said, you should be able to change anything that Creo puts in. It can be quite stubborn at times, but anything is changeable.

 

[tobbo]

Thanks!

the selectionfilter is located at the bottom right of your screen. In sketchermode it probably says "all" by default. Set it to "dimension" and you can easily collect all dim by "making a box around your sketch" (so that all dims will be selected)

http://www.vizpundit.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Filters-in-Creo-View.png

Sometimes when i´m about to sketch something , In sketchermode I just throw out a sketch and don´t care about the scale or dimension, just care about getting my sketch to get the right shape. Then I pick every dimension (using selectionfilter - dimension) - RMB - modify . click the "lock scale" and change ONE dim and every other will follow and my sketch is at the right size. Then I set the constrains and dims.

Did you try the rmb while sketching to get more control of the default constrains?

//Tobias

 

[dross]

Here are the config options that I have set for sketcher.
I do not have the problem that you are displaying, so one of these is probably helpful to you.
(most likely the autolock one)

sketcher_auto_create_refs 2
sketcher_dimension_autolock no
sketcher_disp_weak_dimensions yes
sketcher_equal_length_constr yes
sketcher_highlight_open_ends yes
sketcher_lock_modified_dims yes
sketcher_refit_after_dim_modify no
sketcher_save_preview_image no
sketcher_starts_in_2d YES
sketcher_undo_reorient_view yes

 

[mgnt8]

Are your sketch too complicated ? (many enteties?)

It's been a long long time, but didn't there used to be an error message for this in the pre-Intent Manager days for too many entities? You would spend all that time sketching lines & arcs trying to get them all aligned and in the right location and spacing, then you finally hit regenerate and discover you overdid it and stumped Sketcher.

Sometimes I wish I could get ahold of a copy of 1990s era Pro/E just to laugh at all that frustrating stuff. If only to reenact that scene from Office Space when they baseball bat the fax machine.

It's funny to think about what they're going to say about Creo in 20 years.
"Remember those frustrating days when you had to actually create a 3D model by sketching a bunch of lines & curves? Now you just think of it and the program spits it out. Thank Universe we lost our souls & the robots took over"

 

[moldman]

This has been a nice walk down memory lane. I forgot all about the days when you had to regenerate a sketch.

That being said, I've got something to say about being an "old dog". I am one. I am an engineer, not a cad technician and cad is one of my less important tools (my brain is the most important tool). In general, I spend more time thinking than I do modeling. I use WF3, sometimes WF4. I'm going to be dragged kicking and screaming into this creo world. I started with version 16. I remember improvements being easy to learn because (I'm speaking from memory - it may not be true) they were introduced without completely restructuring the cad package. Then Wildfire came out and because one of our customers used it we were told we had to start using it. There were three of us using Pro. One of us started using WF right away. About a month later the second guy started. I finally had to start about six months later. I remember at the beginning there used to be a box in system colors where you could use "pre-wildfire" color scheme with the blue background. I still turn my background blue so I can see the dimensions against the background. Bottom line is that I was dragged kicking and screaming into the wildfire arena and now that I've learned how to adapt to it I'm not about to go through the same thing with creo. What's a ribbon? Wildfire serves me very well in what I'm doing. I've got more important things to do than figuring out a new tool that replaces a perfectly acceptable one.

Thanks for the crash course in config options Dross. I learned something new today. I didn't know about the lock modified dimensions option and it sounds like it will be useful.