Synchronous Technology In Solid Edge ST3 – Part 9

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In the previous part of the series I moved the circular, triangular and rectangular protrusions to the synchronous side which resulted in the pattern on the ordered side failing to regenerate. Instead of moving all three protrusion features to the synchronous side, what if I moved two of them and left one behind on the ordered side? Sounds crazy, right? Of course, it does. And this is precisely what I enjoy doing. Hacking at a new technology to understand how it works. As you can imagine I am less of a user and more of a programmer.

Anyways, I proceed to move the circular and triangular protrusions to the synchronous side. I get the same feature dependency warning I got earlier and am advised to move the pattern as well. I ignore it and select to move the circular and triangular features only. To my surprise the operation succeeds and the pattern feature actually regenerates itself without error. The feature tree looks like this.

But the model looks like this.

The software didn’t break. However, as you can see it did change the definition of the pattern. With this experiment I arrived at the conclusion that for a pattern to regenerate properly, the features that are being patterned must reside on the same side where the pattern resides. In the previous case when I moved all three protrusions to the synchronous side, the pattern was left alone on the ordered side. It couldn’t find anything to pattern and failed. This time, it found the rectangular protrusion and the software redefined the pattern automatically with whatever it got.

Frankly, I cannot complain that my pattern looks different now because firstly I was told that it was “highly recommended” to move the entire pattern across to the synchronous side. And secondly moving only some of the features of a pattern seems like a stupid thing to do anyways. 😉

Part 10 >>