[Editor’s note: Why are consultants telling their customers to upgrade to Creo 7.0? Just ask Tom McGuire. He has been working with PTC modeling solutions since 1993. Today he provides training, process design and implementation, and modeling services to the federal, aerospace, and defense sector, as well as several commercial customers seeking to maximize the return on their PTC software investment. Get step-by-step upgrade assistance at the Creo Upgrade Resource Center.]

I was perfectly happy using Creo 4.0 for my day-to-day design tasks with no real sense of urgency to move to a newer release of the software. Then I was asked to investigate Creo 7.0 to determine whether there were tools or workflows that could benefit the way our organization creates and leverages their solid models.

After working with Creo 7.0 for a couple of days, I went from little sense of urgency to upgrade to “How soon can we get this rolled out and into the hands of our users?”

In fact, I am encouraging all my customers to make that move as soon as possible, and the reasons for doing so are many.

Core Modeling Enhancements

• The active component in an assembly is obvious by looking at either the display in the graphics window or the Model Tree
• The ability to mirror a sketched entity about a linear entity within your sketch
• Sketcher constraints have a background color and can be made larger and easier to see
• Feedback is obvious and immediate when Sketcher makes assumptions, or when you apply your own constraints to the sketch
• Constraints can be displayed while editing a sketched feature in the solid model
• Additional context-sensitive options are available on the mini toolbar when an item is selected on the model

The thing about these “Nice to Have” enhancements is that you didn’t know you needed them prior to working with Creo 7, but once you have used them for a few hours you will wonder how you were productive at all without them.

Model-based Definition (MBD)

In an ideal world, everything that is typically shown in a mechanical drawing should somehow be embedded in a solid model and made available to a consumer of that information. Creo continues to close the gap between what can be accomplished in a 3D annotated model and what is spelled out in the standards that are being followed when it comes to MBD.

In newer releases, it is possible to start development of MBD deliverables in one standard and switch to another without issue. Creo continues to bring users closer to the solid model being a comprehensive “Single Source of Truth” for the products they design.

Multibody Modeling

The most impactful addition to Creo 7.0, without question, is the introduction of multibody modeling.

Although this type of modeling technique has been available for some time in other modeling packages, this is new ground for Creo, and it works seamlessly within the existing workflows that users are accustomed to using every day.

What excites me the most about this new functionality is that it presents companies with the opportunity to fundamentally change the way they develop their products. After an hour of experimenting with this new workflow I could see how this will impact the customers I have supported. Some of the tools they will be able to leverage are:

• Boolean operations to Merge, Subtract, or Intersect bodies, making geometry that would normally be a bit more difficult to model a little easier to achieve.
• Splitting a single body into multiple bodies.
• Features are added to active body or the feature can be assigned to a new body that is created “on the fly.”
• Bodies can be designated as construction to assist with modeling, but without impacting the mass properties of the part.
• Features, such as a hole or cut, can be added to more than one body at the same time.
• Commonly used duplication tools, such as patterns and Copy/Paste, can be used on bodies as well.
• Parameters, material assignments, and cross hatching can be added to individual bodies within a part model. A drawing, complete with a BOM of the bodies within a part, is also a simple task.

These tools allowed me to quickly work through various use cases that include:

• Modeling a welded structure using bodies, complete with cuts for the ends of adjacent tubes, in a single part model while staying within the context of the overall design. I could then extract the “bodies” from the part model into their own individual part models, add weld prep features to those extracted parts, assemble them into a traditional assembly model using primarily the default constraint, and creating drawings component drawings somewhat easily.
• Modeling all the parts of a quick return mechanism, with a little motion worked into the mix, was also straight forward. Extracting all the individual bodies into their own parts and assembling them into a new assembly using mechanism constraints was surprisingly easy to do.
• Modeling a consumer product, such as a mouse, in a single component and then breaking that component into the individual parts that must snap together to form the shape of the mouse. Normally this would be accomplished through a Master Model technique, but I found the use of multibody modeling to be extremely intuitive for this design situation.
• Building an overmolded component as a single part made of more than a single body, each with its own assigned material.

Overall, the tools available in multibody modeling make Creo 7.0 a product development game-changer.

Conclusion

In my estimation, Creo 7.0 is the most exciting release of PTC design software to be introduced in years. There are so many new tools and methodologies that can now be leveraged to streamline the design and manufacturing process and fundamentally change the way new products are developed.

I am guessing that by the time lunch rolls around on your first day of using Creo 7.0, you will feel the same.