Best Practices: Design Intent/SSP

[MaineSpring]

What have you found to be good rules-of-thumb for in-context design intent? I am transitioning to SW and find that my top-down modeling habits do not serve well when creating complex designs. What workflow yields the most stable designs?

[Tom G]

Top tip for controlling context with a SSP (learned this one from @Roasted By John)
Isolate the driving and driven context parts when defining contexts, so that you are selecting the source and not another driven outcome.

[Roasted By John]

@MaineSpring

Just to add a few more...

Use a flow chart to plan your design and modify it as you go, if needed
Use folders in your feature tree to keep common design entities in one place
Color your Sketches (from @Alin )
Name your sketches (ones that you think will change)
Have one "Common" Part (SSP - Master Part - Master Sketch or whatever else you wanna call it), to share geometries across different components.
Always push information down the feature tree, never ever pull information up from the bottom.
Take a look at what @mattpeneguy and his department did in the final model of a drawbridge.
As you are working the design, once in a while just delete a component, to see if an error occurs, you can always hit the Un-Do Button
Once in a while pick on a sketch and make a dimensional change, take note what moves etc, hit the Un-Do Button to go back

[mattpeneguy]

• Turn on Dynamic Reference Visualization
• Use Derived Sketches
• Try to use planes if at all possible to drive the parts/asms (Alin and John also recommend surfaces, but I haven't used that much). Sketch entities tend to lose their external references.
• Don't be afraid to start over from scratch. The first few times you create something you will have a tendency to leave out important info. You can try to salvage it, but you probably would do better to just start from scratch.
• This method scales to large assemblies. But try to compartmentalize it. Create subassemblies which have an SSP driven by the ASM (SSP) they reside in. The subassembly can then have a subsubassembly driven by the subassembly SSP. I think I have an assembly that is 6 levels deep. You do have to "drive" changes into the subassemblies by opening them or with a macro, but it does work.

[HerrTick]

I've done top-down design in SolidWorks, Creo, and NX. In spite of their differences, the methods are pretty much the same.

What are you doing that doesn't work?

[Roasted By John]

I've done top-down design in SolidWorks, Creo, and NX. In spite of their differences, the methods are pretty much the same.

What are you doing that doesn't work?

ahhhmm - Using SolidWorks

[DanPihlaja]

Check this out:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=371