Part II: Building Intelligence into Your Parts
FIGURE 7.33Using the FilletXpert selection technique
Performance
For rebuild speed efficiency, you should make fillets in a minimum number of features. For example, if you
have 100 edges to fillet, it is better for performance to do it with a single fillet feature that has 100 edges
selected rather than 100 fillet features that have one edge selected. This is the one case where creating the fea-
ture and rebuilding the feature are both faster by choosing a particular technique. (Usually if it is faster to cre-
ate, it rebuilds more slowly.)n
Best Practice
Although creation and rebuild speed are in sync when you use the minimum number of features to create the
maximum number of fillets, this is not usually the case. (There had to be a downside.) When a single feature
has a large selection, any one of these edges that fail to fillet will cause the entire feature to fail. As a result, a
feature with 100 edges selected is 100 times more likely to fail than a feature with a single edge. Large selec-
tion sets are also far more difficult to troubleshoot when they fail than small selection sets that fail.n
Using folders
When you have a large number of fillet features, it can be tedious to navigate the FeatureManager.
Therefore, it is useful to place groups of fillets into folders. This makes it easy to suppress or
unsuppress all the fillets in the folder at once. Separate folders can be particularly useful if the fil-
lets have different uses, such as fillets that are used for PhotoWorks models and fillets that are
removed for FEA (Finite Element Analysis) or drawings.