How to Isolate a Weldment Body Revisited [VIDEO]

Some time back, I had written a blog article about how to isolate a weldment body for detailing. While this method works well, there is one weakness: the part containing the entire weldment has no “knowledge” that the bodies have been saved out. This means that if I perform a Pack & Go on this weldment, I will not get the parts that I isolated. If there was a feature that I could put in the feature tree of the entire weldment part, then I wouldn’t have this limitation. Enter the “Save Bodies” feature.

Using the Save Bodies Feature

If I right-click on the Cut List, I can choose Save Bodies, then specify which bodies I would like to save out as separate parts. This method has the added bonus of being able to do this to as many bodies as I want, compared to doing them one at a time as discussed in the other blog article. The feature that gets added to the entire weldment part can serve as a “trail of breadcrumbs” when I do my Pack & Go.

This method works equally well for any multibody part.

There is another method if you want to isolate a weldment body in a single view that does not involve saving out the body as its own part (Insert > Drawing View > Relative to Model, then use the Selected Bodies option), but that’s another story altogether. Stay tuned.