In order for Solve to be able to generate a variation of a part, every element in the part must be completely constrained. To manually assign a complete set of constraints to a part of even moderate complexity would be time consuming and prone to error. The Complete command provides an efficient alternative. Complete scans the geometry currently in the zone and generates a reasonable set of constraints that is sufficient to completely constrain the geometry in its current configuration. In many situations, only a few constraints need be set manually before running Complete, and a few more changed after Complete is run to generate the variation. The Strategy for Assigning Constraints section below explains how to best integrate the automatic and manual options.

Simply select Complete and Parametric Design generates constraints. A series of messages is displayed to inform you of the command's progress. While generating constraints, Complete may add a number of point elements to your part. These are needed to fix point-on or reference-point constraints, and should not be removed from the part. By default, these points are drawn as green ×s, but you can easily change this to make them nearly invisible. See Parametric Design Defaults for details.

Complete takes into account any constraints that you may have manually assigned to the part. If these constraints are inconsistent with one another, Complete may not be able to successfully generate a complete set of valid constraints. In this case, error messages and highlighting warn you about the problem and help you track down the cause. The error-trapping mechanism used by Complete is also used by Solve. See the Solver Errors section later in this Chapter for more information.