Working with large arrays

[NigelHay]

I know that Inventor is notoriously bad at handling large arrays but are there any tips for at least making it bearable? I'm having to model ceramic anodes which are about 60x60x2mm but have arrays of small gold pads on both sides. I've modeled the pads by extruding 1 pad on each side then arraying these, initially at 32x32 each side, then at 64x64 & we will be going to 128x128. Inventor bogs down even with the smaller arrays so I've been suppressing the arrays in the components to get some performance back but that means that I have to unsuppress it so that the features can be dimensioned in drawings or shown in rendered images.

Could I have approached these parts in some other way that would have worked better?

Inv2017

Win7 64 bit.

[mpatchus]

Not actually seeing what you are trying to accomplish makes this a stab, but try arraying your sketch geometry and extruding all of the pads as one extrusion. 

[NigelHay]

Do you think that would make a difference, I imagined that the performance problem was simply down to the number of faces & edges generated. I'm wondering now though, if I arrayed the sketch feature as you suggest then used the sketch to produce a split face, would that work?

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! I thought this request was discussed recently. If I were you, I would create the first gold plate as a separate body. Then I will pattern the body with Join option. In this way, the pattern occurrences all belong to one body. Lastly, use Combine command to join the main body and the patterned body.

Many thanks!

[mpatchus]

Well in terms of file size, the sketch method is actually slightly larger.

However, I didn't notice a significant difference with either while in Inventor.

[Tom_Sturtevant]

Hi Nigel,

Are you using the “Optimized” pattern option?  It will not work for all cases, but it looks like it should work with the geometry you are patterning and it is much faster. 

Of course any of the suggested options (sketch pattern, multi body + combine, optimized) really will only help with the pattern creation.  A 128x128 occurrence pattern of simple extruded pads will result in close to 100K faces and 200K edges (and 2X since you will have them on both sides).  That will definitely impact your interactive graphics performance.

Tom

[NigelHay]

I was using the optimised pattern. I'll try some of the suggestions here when I get a chance & report back if it makes any improvement.