Virtual Components that are not In Context!

My apologies for the belated blogs. Work has been extremely busy and I have been travel training for 3 weeks straight. That being said I found an interesting concept in one of my recent Advanced Assembly training sessions.

You can make virtual components that are not in context to an assembly. This concept kind of blew my mind at first... because virtual components only exist inside of the assembly...

I had actually done this a manual method once or twice by creating a new component at the assembly level and then deleting the in place mate that is created.

But a new method has actually spawned an interesting workflow. A head designer for one of the companies that I recently trained mentioned that he was looking for a way to do conceptual machine design, without necessarily creating all of the part files in specific hard drive locations. He wants this functionality because he spends alot of time creating folder and sub assembly structures for machines that MIGHT get built. Not to mention all of the parts need internal ID numbers.

So we figured out this interesting workflow: If you create a new part in a new assembly file, you can click in space and SW will create the Virtual Component without the In Place mate reference. It also does not put you in Edit component mode. If you right click open the new Virtual Component SW virtualizes a part file, where the part can be drawn from scratch on it's own refernce planes. When you toggle back to the assembly the Virtual Component updates and reflects the changes. If you continue to repeat this process, you can create all of the Virtual Components bottom up, and they will only exist within the assembly. Hence the ability to quickly create machine concepts without the cumbersome task of file structuring and internal part numbering, until it gets to a production stage.

This does have a few draw backs; first and formost: All of the parts would be Virtual. Which means that backups of the Assembly are even MORE important. Secondly, it does cause the need to externalize the files and create a file structure when the machine goes from concept to production.

I don't think that this is the best workflow for every company, but it certainly something to consider if you find yourself creating designs that never see the light of day!