I can understand why some of you
might find this post boring and hard to read so I have sprinkled it with images
from London Underground, mainly Tube Line Service Update and to be honest the
first one matches my feeling and situation exactly.
 |
| My feeling exactly when Inventor T&P failed to update |
But
what good is all this knowledge and skill if I don’t share the findings? On
this premises today I will share a problem I had the other day and the solution
I found for fixing this.
On one
of my large plant layouts I had to activate “Defer all Tube & Pipe Updates”
so I can do changes to the equipment, foundation and the rest of the plant.
Changing a single constraint can take forever on large assemblies especially if
that implies updates to tube and pipe. On this particular job I had about 24
runs with multiple routes and even on decent CAD Workstation it can seem forever.
So I’ve
disabled updates on Tue and Pipe and I have started churning away on all the
changes imposed by the client. Couple of days later when I finished I have
decided it’s time to update some of the pipe routes. I usually work my way one
route at a time, fixing connections, dimensions, and adding/removing elements.
When I am happy with the results I turn to the next one but before I could even
start I have hit a brick wall and couldn’t pass over it.
I can’t
seem to be able to turn off “Defer all Tube & Pipe Updates”. I right click
the TP assembly node and choose “Tube & Pipe Settings”, tick off the
option, click OK and ... nothing happens. No change of icons, they still are red
lightning bolt, and the “Defer all Tube & Pipe Updates” is still marked on
the T&P. First thought was to make a new TP asm and recreate the structure
of all the Runs which will take a while because they are only 24 if you recall
so I wasn’t really keen to do that.
It's like the Matrix deja-vu; keep ticking off and it's not working.
First
thing I tried was to open the T&P asm on a separate window and suppress all
the runs, and for that I had to create a new Level Of Detail (LOD). Switched
back to my original assembly and tried to change T&P representation to my
new LOD and nothing happen. Stuck again I have decided to suppress the Runs from
the main assembly, and now turning off “Defer all Tube & Pipe Updates” was
working. Feeling that I am getting closer I tried to unsuppressed the RUNS and
while they showed up they still had the red lightning bolt icon on them meaning
that they might not update and cause problems down the road. I bet this is not
just a glitch on the icon and I will have update problems in the future.
 |
| LOD not working either. |
I have
turned back defer updates and suppressed the runs, then I started to un-supress
them one at a time and to turn back on defer updates afterwards so I can track
if there’s a specific run or set of runs that cause the problem.
And I
was right! One particular run once unsuppressed it didn’t allowed me to change
T&P defer update settings. Using the same procedure I have narrow it down
to a single route that was being my pain. Even though the route is displayed in
red in the browser, which usually means there are some issues with it (not
violations), I can’t seem to find what’s wrong with it. It is simple enough to
be bulletproof; 8 lines fully constrained, and yet it’s acting weird.
 |
| Source of my problem. |
 |
| Can't see what's wrong with it. |
Hope
you never get the headache I have from T&P and hope you learned something
new to try before starting over from scratch. A different solution might be to recreate the Tube and Pipe assembly altogether; just the T&P assembly though, not the routes and all that work, but I will be talking about that on a separate post.
Will end with Quote of the Day:
Later,
ADS
No comments:
Post a Comment