5 Exciting Enhancements Coming In NX8

by Pat Barrett

At this year's PLM World (the national NX Users Group meeting) the folks at Siemens unveiled some of the new productivity-enahancing tools they have developed for NX8, due out late this summer. While they revealed many new items, I tried to pick only a few to maintain brevity. This was tough. I thought the following five enhancements were the most worthy of sharing.

1) Feature Patterning (Modeling): Siemens developed a number of new patterning methods for feautures like holes, pockets, ribs, etc.

• Area Fill type lets you pattern a feature inside a curve/edge/interior opening. You can specify a distance from the bounding geometry to be maintained and selectively omit features from the pattern.  

Creating Patterned Features Like This Just Got Easier!

• General Pattern allows you to use values in a spreadsheet to control point locations for a feature pattern. This could potentially help with general data import tasks, too. (e.g. create your first point, then import the inspection data from your spreadsheet and use this to pattern 'create' the points in space.) We'll have to play with this more to see if that last idea holds water.

2) Make Unique (Assemblies): This enhancement is a carry over from the I-deas platform. It allows you to select a component in an assembly, save it as a new name, re-apply the assembly constraints, and update the assembly. This also lets you create a new unique part that is a 'variant' of the existing one without having to do a 'Save-As' and re-assemble the component.

3) Reorder Blend (S/T): This new Synchronous Modeling (direct edit) feature allows you to change the order that blends were applied to the model. AFTER the fact! It works on imported model data (Parsolid, STEP, IGES, etc) or native NX .prt files. So, even if you or someone you know didn't make the part you can still modify it.  

4) Section Views - Smart callouts for sheet location (Drafting): Now in Drafting when you create a section view and place the section view on the sheet, the section view sheet 'grid' location is automatically added to the view name. You need to have locations displayed on your view names. This will save some time for sure.

5) Knowledge Based Machining - Feature teaching, operation teaching (CAM): If you haven't moved to the time-saving automation benefits that feauture based machining (FBM) delivers, then these new enhancements should certainly convince you. FBM allows you to automate programming and tool selection for commonly made features. The new 'Feature' and 'Operation Teaching' tools speed up your library creation and establish standards that all programmers can adopt. Increases of up to 10X faster programming have been documented, and the added benefit of standardization in machining will help in overall shop consistency.