Got some time to play with it.
Structure-01.jpg
First it is a pain to learn how the UI and command behave.
Get it done in one go is ok. If you need to edit after, good luck. Spend a day playing with it first before use it in production.
Primary and secondary Member:
If you used weldment using sketch for member, everything is Primary. You can have multiple Primary.
Secondary is whatever you want to go between any Primary member.
It is “powerful”.
You can see I got a few “random” between different members. No sketch, nothing. Just pick the members and it’ll add a member in between.
Its fun but the fun stop here.
Haven’t find a way to “dimension” those members. Like angle to another member. You can change distance from the “pierce Point”. You can rotate the profile align to other face plane.
If I want an art piece with random tube/beam across some members, its perfect. Like a bird nest.
I better find a place to hide before I release it to the shop.
Don’t have it yet, still on 2018, but would be interested to see a breakdown of advantage of structure over weldments. What you describe sounds a lot like I would do the same thing in weldments using structural members. Everything except the “Secondary” parts without a sketch…which sounds sketchy to me. How do control where the ends of the secondary members are?
Regular weldments have generally been working well for me for a long time, so unless someone convinces me that the new thing will be better for what I do I’m going to stick with it. I rarely deal with anything very complex, with most of my models having fewer than 6 bodies (and often just 2), so I’m not at all sure I’d benefit from it.
Distance of the start or end of the members it attach to which is useless for parametric. Unless you put them in a design table afterward.
Just crashed it changing from tube to Z.
Pretty hard to beat this, Solidworks. Gonna need to upgrade to 3Dspearience to compete.
2021-06-02 16_14_23.jpg
Everything is handled inside a special “frame” assembly environment with each body in its own part. No Save Bodies, no external references, IT JUST WORKS!
Also, did I mention that SE’s 3D sketching works really well?
Which is essentially what is done with weldments and structural members. If I’m doing a welded tube or other structural item I make a 3D sketch and just start placing Structural members. Weldments has multiple methods of end trims etc. All the bodies are contained in a single part but can also be pulled out into cut lists or individual item drawings.
Modify the 3D sketch and the entire thing updates. Essentially this is what I did in Inventor for years and what I do in SW. One would assume, maybe incorrectly, that “Structures” adds some new neat functionality, but I’ve not played with it enough to know.
We have 2020 installed on a machine here so I did play with it for a while. As Frederick pointed out the UI is less than intuitive so I really didn’t get anywhere so I didn’t find any “Magic sauce”
I’m actually curious as to what the benefits where. I read one article and walked away from it more confused than bedazzled.
From what I understand there is little to be gained for anyone that is weldments for plate structured items like machine bases and typical machine weldments. Supposedly all the awesomness is in the structural part of it and I’m not quite sure what that is. I have seen one thing with patterning that was touted as “amazing”, but unless you’re doing a massive singular steel structure I would think you would want to break things like that down into S/A’s anyway rather than one single massive weldment.
I think I crashed the license server with structure system.
If the frame is weld only, it could work. As long as you’re not the one cutting.
It is fun to throw random section at random spot to make a frame.
If I can finish my art, I’ll post it.
That’s how I feel just about every time I try to digest a “what’s new in …” or marketing article. I’m not sure but I think we are more confused than bedazzled because the bedazzlers are confused themselves. I just apply the typical response of “You’re doing it wrong” to my own questions and then things clear up.
Is there any internal benefit for purposes of Simulation to use Structure System over Weldments? Weldments already mesh pretty well when needed in Simulation, and can be some of the easiest large items to simulate. I would hope that Structure Systems mesh equally well.
Like Frederick, I messed around with it after installing 2020 and reading the “what’s new”. Like most things related to modeling, your own personal creativity and ingenuity often dictate how successful you are at using some of these tools as they were designed to be used, but yeah, with structural systems it seems to be all about the planning. I did think that in the example they used to promote the tool showed an instance where it could really be a powerful option, but I believe standard weldments will still work just fine for the majority of users.
I’ve got a structural platform project coming up with some handrails.. etc… I might see if I can use the combination of the (2) to make life any easier. As long as they don’t lose their minds and remove weldment’s in the future - I’ll be okay with continued development of the structure systems.
