Nesting Help - Update Nest Study with Model

[andrewdroth]

Can I link model changes to a nesting study?

See screencast.

[phillip.doup · Accepted solution]

Hello @andrewdroth,

There's a couple of things going on here that are perhaps confusing the situation.

First, when the refresh symbol is there for any part or assembly, it indicates that it needs to be refreshed.
 
It shows up in the Sources dialog as well:

The remedy is if an assembly has changed, to right-click the assembly and "Refresh". This pulls the new BOM from the assembly into the Nesting document for that assembly. Then, any parts that also need refreshed can be dealt with in the Sources command by re-extracting them:

Second, you have the "Automatic Update" turned off, so you aren't seeing the graphics update to reflect your changes because you've disabled that update. If you turn Automatic Update on and/or click Update All, it will update the graphics with the changes to reflect the re-extracted parts.

[andrewdroth]

I think I missed the re-extract process. I figured the update would do that.

I'll try again. 

[andrewdroth]

@phillip.doup thanks for your help.

I got it now. I guess the update button just updates the graphical representation of the extracted shapes, is that correct?

Is there any downside to leaving automatic update on?

[phillip.doup]

The ability to turn automatic updates off is there because these models can get quite large and everything in the nesting document is associative. If you're making a ton of changes to the sources, which then chain into updates of everything downstream, it can be quite a performance hog especially if you're making changes through several commands. Each command would require you to wait for the update to finish while it completes the update. That's why the ability to disable automatic updates is there, so you can disable it in these cases, but that should be fairly rare. Note that when you do turn it off, the Update All will update all of the objects that are out-of-date (the lightning bolt icon) and you can also update them one-by-one through the contextual menu on each object.

Outside of the use case I've mentioned here, there should be no need to ever disable it. I believe it'll be obvious when the case occurs that you need to disable it, because you'll find yourself spending a lot of time waiting on the update to finish.

[andrewdroth]

I think I'm missing something here. If I change the model it doesn't automatically update the nesting study, but you are saying it should?

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@phillip.doup wrote:

If you're making a ton of changes to the sources, which then chain into updates of everything downstream,

[phillip.doup]

@andrewdroth, I'll try to make it as clear as I can.

There are two kinds of "update" things that happen here in the Nesting environment. The first is an update of graphics, to show you visually what matches the changes you've made and then there's a background computation of the nest, which may take a long time (hours, potentially). 

The Updates I was referring to earlier are just the visual updates. If you can imagine having hundreds of parts on screen, redrawing those could be quite time consuming and you could potentially have to wait after every command if Automatic Updates are on and you're making broad changes that affect many parts. We let you turn that off in these cases if you need.

However, when you have changes to parts that you want recomputed in your nesting study, you'll have to compute the nests. When you normally create a new nest study, this happens without you needing to do anything because of this little check button here:

But, when making changes to the parts, materials, packaging, etc. we don't automatically recompute the nest because it's always time consuming and you might want to make several changes before recomputing the nest. In this case, you'll see two indications that the nest might need recomputed: the icons on the nest and study:

and in the Calculate Nest dock panel:

To recalculate the nests, you have the following options:

Calculate on a specific nest study.

Calculate on a nest:

Calculate on the Calculate Nest panel:

Or calculate all on the nest panel:

The Calculate Nest panel is a job manager for calculating all of the nests. Like I said above, this can take some time, so this panel shows you the overall progress, allowing you to continue doing other things until it is finished, after which it'll save the nest results into the document.

I hope this clears up how the two things are a bit different.

[andrewdroth]

Sorry @phillip.doup ,

I don't think I was being clear with my question.

There is no direct link between model changes and profiles in the nesting environment, correct?

An "Update" will never reflect model changes as I understand it.

[phillip.doup]

@andrewdroth 

You are correct, the "update" stuff that is happening will never change the geometry in the nesting environment, it just accounts for all of the other kinds of changes you might have to the numerous properties on materials, packaging, sources, etc.