In my continuing development of parametric dome roof plate cells I've run across another curiosity.
In this case, I can place the cell with the radial plates and a single center cap plate, and then punch holes in them:
But when I try placing a differently configured plate arrangement, I get this message: "Element not valid for tool" and it will not allow the hole.
Any ideas on how to do this without dropping the cell? Because when I do this for some reason the thickness variable gets lost and it goes from 0'0.25 to 750'0!
I have also encountered many similar issues with constrained holes. It doesn't sound like your holes are constrained. But rather, you are punching them into the cell after the cell is placed into another model... This is a surprise to me as I did not even think that could be accomplished with at least first performing a drop on "application element".
If you were to place the parametric cell into a model, do drop APPLICATION ELEMENT only then try to punch the hole, what result do you get?
I actually just tried that while investigating a hunch on the thickness issue. [Our company's seed file working units do not match the current Bentley out-of-the-box working units. It appears that when placing the cell in a dgn with working units that match those of the cell library, the thickness is retained when the cell is dropped.] Once the cell is dropped (with application elements selected) regular parametric manipulations like creating a hole will work. The odd thing however is that sometimes you don't have to drop a cell to be able to manipulate it. That seems to be controlled by the number of manipulations already "nested" as it were in the cell itself.
I'd be interested to know what sorts of "nested manipulations" you can accomplish when cell status is fully intact. Are you referring to simply changing parametric parameters? That would make sense to me. Anything else, I would find surprising. Nice to see someone else really trying to leverage parametrics. They've come a long way, but still have a long way to go. Very buggy. I've been frustrated with them for a long time.
It seems to let you do very simple operations. These 2 cells will let me put holes, chamfers and fillet edges on them and still remain cells.
However, it seems that even without dropping the cell, it is somehow creating an new parametric solid with the cell as a basis.
Hi Jeff, are you using Update 17? Curious.
In any case, the ability to access the elements nested in the Cell is a step forward. See this recent post where an element in the Cell needed to be trimmed by another element.
I think that this will be quite common. You have a vessel or tank, and at some point you will need to add some connections to piping etc. Dropping the vessel Cell every time is pretty problematic. Better to allow the Cell to be 'permeable' to Mstn tools. The old Mstn convention where all nested elements within the Cell was off limits (unless you were using Fence Stretch) is pretty incompatible with today's MCAD style assemblies:components working.
MCAD's CSG legacy tends to organise components in a feature tree. And yes, you get access to all levels to manipulate the components. This is something that has been sorely missing in Mstn's handling of Cells. This is slowly changing. See tech preview for editing Cells in place in Update 17.