Improve Model Performance with Lightweight Representations of Holes

When you’re working on a CAD part that has thousands of holes, or maybe you’re designing a large hole pattern, you don’t want your model’s complexity to slow down regeneration of the model and, thus, your productivity.

You can now (as of Creo 8) change hole geometry from a solid to a lightweight representation—improving the performance of your design through reduced memory usage and regeneration time.

You might be thinking that lightweight representations of holes were available in previous versions of Creo Parametric — and you’re right! However, the option to use lightweight holes was previously available only for certain types of holes.

With Creo 8, you can use it for any type of hole. This includes standard and drilled/sketched simple holes in the part modeling environment. Beyond Creo Parametric, this functionality is also available in other Creo part modeling environments, such as Sheet Metal and eCAD.

Converting a standard hole to a lightweight representation (or lightweight hole to a standard hole) is simple.

Right-click a hole in the Model Tree or graphics window and choose, either:

• Hole Representation > Convert to Lightweight
• Hole Representation > Solid

Lightweight holes are represented by an axis and a circumference curve, without removing material. Note: Lightweight holes do not contribute to the mass properties calculation.

See how it works in this short video:

PTC developers did a ton of work on holes in Creo 8 and lightweight representations of holes is just one example of those efforts. To learn more about the newest capabilities in Creo, watch the replay of the Creo 8 Usability and Productivity Conference.