Part VI: Using Advanced Techniques
The image on the left in Figure 26.10 is the raw imported part. The middle image shows a planar
surface created on the face of the part, where the planar surface has been used with the Split fea-
ture to cut the leg off the part. The image on the right shows the split leg patterned around an axis
that was created from the intersection of two planes.If you would like to practice with this part, it is on the CD-ROM for Chapter 26; the imported
Parasolid file is named Chapter 26 – Pattern import.x_t.FIGURE 26.10Splitting away a body and patterning it
Performance
In some situations, patterning bodies is a performance advantage, and in some situations it is not. You get an
advantage from patterning bodies when the geometry used to create the pattern seed is complex, uses many
features, or does not work well or at all for a feature pattern.
On the other hand, if you repeat the experiments from Chapter 8 using a small body with a hole in it instead of
patterning a hole feature, you find that the body pattern is far slower than the feature patterning because of
the necessary step of combining bodies. n
Simplifying very complex parts
Certain types of parts work better when they’re built in sections as separate parts than when they
are built as a single feature tree. For very complex parts with a lot of features, this sometimes
makes sense from the point of view of segmenting the rebuild times for parts with hundreds of
features. The example used to demonstrate this technique is a large plastic part built entirely
from ribs, and making use of literally hundreds of solid bodies, and is shown in Figure 26.11 and
Figure 26.12.