Managing Modeling Entities Through Suppression and Family Tables
You can use a number of techniques to manage the appearance or availability of the modeling entities in your model. Many of these techniques primarily manage visibility states. However, two of these techniques are more powerful—affecting not only the visibility of a modeling entity, but its presence or absence during meshing and analysis. These two techniques are:
• suppression of specific modeling entities through the Suppress command
• suppression of specific modeling entities through the creation of family table instances tailored to the specific types of simulation
Managing your model through these techniques can help you simplify and organize its modeling entities. It can also help you meet a variety of different simulation needs without having to create and maintain separate versions of the same model.
For example, assume you have a model that you want to evaluate using both static analysis and dynamic analysis. However, you want to apply a different set of AutoGEM controls for the static analysis than you do for the dynamic analysis. In this case, you would create all the mesh controls in the same model. But, prior to running the static analysis, you would use the Suppress command to turn off the dynamic analysis AutoGEM controls. With these entities suppressed, Creo Simulate only uses the static analysis mesh controls and ignores the suppressed dynamic analysis AutoGEM controls when it creates the mesh at the beginning of the static analysis. Thus, the Suppress command has given you the option of using either of the two AutoGEM control sets without having to maintain separate models.
You can achieve a similar effect using family tables within the simulation environment. In this case, you would create two family table instances in your model—instance1 containing the static AutoGEM controls, and instance 2 containing the dynamic analysis controls. You would work in instance 1 when running the static analysis and instance 2 when running the dynamic analysis.
You can suppress the following modeling entities using either the Suppress command or the family table instances:
• Loads
• Constraints
• Connections
• Idealizations
• Mesh controls
The way you use the
Suppress command and create family table instances in
Creo Simulate is similar to how you work with this functionality in
Creo Parametric. However the progression, implications, and cases for use are different. To learn about the specifics of using suppression and family tables, see
Suppression and Family Tables.
Refer to the Fundamentals Help for more information on the basics of entity suppression and family tables.