ProE® - Size of assemblies

In ProE®, you can have “family table” of parts or assemblies. For example you have a bolt part. You want to make a “family” of bolts from this geometry, some with different diameters, some with different lengths. In Pro/E you create a family table. The current geometry in the bolt.prt is called the “generic”, and then you have a table of values for the different lengths and diameters – each unique combination of length and diameter is called an “instance”.
In an assembly, you can then insert one of these “instances” into the assembly. However, there is no “real” geometry representing that instance – Pro/E first loads the “generic” geometry, and then looks at the family table information and modifies the dimensions based on the values for that instance. In seemage, if all we have for import to Seemage is the original bolt.prt file, we can read the initial “generic” geometry. So if the generic bolt.prt geometry was very wide and very long, compared to the instance that was inserted into the assembly, then some bolts in Seemage look too long. The solution in Pro/E is to force Pro/E to create a special geometry file for every instance used in an assembly. These geometry files are called “instance accelerators”. Pro/E can then directly read in the geometry of the instance itself (instead of first reading the generic and then making a change), and this direct reading of the instance geometry greatly speeds up the loading of the assembly. Pro/E can also have family tables on assemblies – where each instance of the assembly controls things like what components are in the model, offset constraint distances, and maybe some special parameter values specific to that instance. So you can have assembly instance accelerators too.
So in order to read correctly the geometry in seemage, it is important to export families tables (.xpr and .xas files). In ProE© go to the Tools/Options menu and configure "save_instance_accelerator" to "always".
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