Making the Most of the Application

The following paragraphs deal with ways of improving your use of the application.

Order of Feature Recognition

The order in which you should recognize features must be the reverse of one of the possible orders of feature creation. For instance, if you try to recognize a pad after selecting this face, the operation will fail.

  To recognize the pad, first of all you must recognize the pocket so as to remove the faces, and then, you will be able to recognize the pad.

Identifying Multiple Solutions

The application provides a fine control over the way a set of faces is recognized as a given feature. For instance, you can control the feature to be recognized by using options such as Up to face or by selecting edges instead of faces for pad or pocket recognition. However, there are still cases where there are different ways in which faces can be removed.

This is the case of this part:

  There are several ways of recognizing the green face. You can recognize it as a groove, as a hole or as a pocket. If you decide to recognize it as a pocket, again you can choose between two solutions. The final simplified solid you can obtain is either a pocket whose profile is a complete circle or an arc as illustrated here:
 

 

Which is the best solution?

To answer this question, you need to consider different factors many of which depend on the context. Giving a general answer is therefore not possible. However, the application attempts to provide the solution that represents the most intuitive way of creating the part. Thus, in our example, the second solution is the solution provided by the application.
 

Chaining Faces for Boolean Operations
  Since there is no chaining for Boolean recognition, you can make use of the chaining functionality of other feature types. For instance, if the Boolean feature to be recognized is somewhat like a groove, then you can choose Groove and pick a face with the Chain Faces optionon. This will lead to several faces getting selected. If now you switch the feature type to Boolean, the faces will still be selected, and can be used for Boolean recognition.
 

Selecting Faces
 
  • It might be sometimes difficult to select the faces you need for recognition. Some parts may require that you hide bodies prior to selecting the faces.
  • Only faces and edges belonging to the In Work Object can be selected.
  • You can select only faces that are appropriate for the feature type being recognized. For instance, you cannot select planar faces for fillet recognition.
 

Handling Deactivated Features Created by Part Design Feature Recognition
  Most often, deactivated features are not due to the application failures, it is just that whenever the application cannot create the features it recognizes, it deactivates those features. This behavior is valid for any feature type. What you need to do, is edit the feature and add the right specifications as much as possible.