Taking designs to production

[David_HCB]

Hi all,

Some guidance sought.

After 12 months of learning and several renditions of several models I've finally got to the point where I'm ready to move a design into physical production.

As you can see from below, my models are reasonably complex.

I've had some experience with the the Drawing, Animation, Rendering and Manufacturing workspaces in isolation but now it's to to bring things together in a suite of documents.

The outputs I'm planning to do are as follows.

Drawings: Several views, exploded diagrams and construction layouts of parts. Probably 50 drawing pages

Rendering: Some nice pics

Animation: Mainly used to constructions videos and instructions, probably 20 or so

Manufacturing: for the obvious CAM stuff. There will be approximately 300 individual toolpaths and a number of groups containing them.

Current f3z archive is 180Mb in size.

Given the model is rather heavy, would it make sense to base all of the four outputs above each based upon derived models and just relying on the master to keep things up to date should there be design changes?

Any other considerations that would be useful?

Thanks

David

[CGBenner]

@David_HCB 

This is not helpful, but I just coudn't resist (I really tried)... I don't think that boat is going to float very well.  😂

I'm sorry... poor attempt at humor.  That's actually a cool looking design.

[jeff_strater · Accepted solution]

Wow, David, your boat is looking fantastic!  Nice work, and I know it's been a struggle at times.  Congratulations.

Yes, I would definitely recommend adding a Derive level of indirection for these types of "downstream" workflows.  It would not be needed for a smaller design, but for something this large, I would definitely make a lot of use of Derive.  Except, maybe for rendering.  Renders are not stored with the model, so you can feel free to do those on your main model.  And, specifically for CAM, I would have LOTS of Derived designs, because the toolpaths are going to be heavy themselves.  You probably don't want to have one for each component, that would be overkill, but you could create groups of components that you might want to cut out of one piece, if that is the method you are going to use.

[HughesTooling]

@jeff_strater 's advice for CAM is definitely correct, I've run into problems making injection moulds if I try and do everything in one design. One problem you might have if you make several derived designs, you will not be able to copy the whole project if you want to reuse it for something similar. If you have a chain on linked designs you can copy the top level assembly\2d drawing and get a copy of all links as an F3Z but if the project has a branch to several derived designs you can't create a copy and maintain links.

I have worked around this by creating another assembly and linking in all the derived designs but this will not work for and 2d drawings. I was a bit surprised this worked but I only needed to link 3 derived designs into a top level assembly.

Mark

[David_HCB]

Thanks Jeff,

So ended up creating for CAM around a dozen derives each with between about 10 and 30 components depending on the nesting for each 8' x 4' ply sheet.

Unfortunately I had to do a bit of too'ing and fro'ing between each new derive modifying the included components as I had to some degree pick them manually to create optimal nesting. SO just needed to manually check I'd derived all the parts by checking them off a list. I have 5 different thicknesses of parts too.

The Arrange feature doesn't work optimally in my situation I assume due to my large amount of irregular shapes - so after each Arrange came many component moves.

Only performance hit really in this step is the fact that as a result of doing the above was the master design had around 100 saves thrown at it. But it's now done.

Working with the Manufacturing model and it's Setups, CAM tool paths - and there is generally a mix of 2D Contours, 3D Contours, 2D Boring and some Parallel performance is perfect. Everything is essentially responding in real time in the UI.

Thanks for the advice, and from others also.

As usual the forum is a good safe place to ask such questions.

David

[David_HCB]

Hey all good, I got the joke!