I took another look at the efficiency of the cube.
I applied a "Hail Mary" value to the diagonal's pattern fill section by making the width 2x the "big_cube"
In fact, you only need 2x "big_cube" minus "cube". This removes a superfluous copy at the corners.
Overall it didn't change the regeneration time by much, but worth noting.
d<nn>=(2*big_cube)-cube in the relations of 6 patterns
However, this effort did prove that the model is robust to any whole number value for nest-size.
This is the logic behind the fill pattern of the diagonals:
- You cannot make the "diamond" fill-pattern required normal to the axis of the diagonal rods.
- There is a tilted square pattern if you look normal to the cube.
- The pattern dimension is the diagonal offset which is the diagonal of the 1/2 the cell size. (mini_diag)
- The diagonal rod fill-pattern fills "laterally" along the normal cube.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
I did try a few other things and they failed miserably. The first thing was to try pattern-geometry copy. This threw out errors and, although the feature count went down dramatically, the regeneration time was still atrocious. There is still a lot of geometry checking going on.
What I don't understand is why the Pattern Option -Identical- is grayed out for all the patterns except the first one. This should resolve a lot of the regen issues. In theory, this would make a blind copy regardless of geometry checks. This use to work wonders in Unigraphics NX. I'm in Creo 2.0 M040 so I don't know if anything has changed in this regard in later versions. This is probably worth a support case to find out the reasoning behind it.
I would really like to invite one of PTC's gurus to have a look at this. Download the above file and set it to 9 replications (nest_size) and see just how much effort this requires. The regeneration seems to be never-ending! What is a better solution to improve regeneration times?
