Introduction

CadActive-Skeletons is a powerful product within the CadActive platform that helps organizations streamline and automate workflows around skeleton models. Skeletons are one of many important methods for efficiently managing large assemblies in Creo Parametric. CadActive Skeletons incorporate industry-wide best practices, yet are configurable for each organization. These best practices have been documented and can be found in the link below. We recommend ALL users check out this document for more information on the finding and best practices that CadActive-Skeletons incorporate and enable.

Best Practices

Simplified Process Flow

Below is a simplified process diagram showing the recommended general workflow for skeleton modeling.

The intricacies of each of these three process steps will be elaborated on, but it helps to have an overview.

Starting Out

CadActive Skeletons Settings

Before anyone begins using CadActive-Skeletons, please review the above page to make sure the right settings are set for your organization!

Publish

Geometry Publisher Basics

The above document will guide users on how to use the Geometry Publisher to publish critical geometry at the assembly component level. CadActive-Skeletons will create the Published Geometry features using standard naming conventions (defined in the organization Settings), neatly grouped in the footer of the component. These published features will eventually be leveraged to populate skeleton models with copy geometry features.

Create Skeleton

Skeleton Creation Basics

Skeleton PRTs are created at the relevant top-level assemblies and added into needed lower-level assemblies. 

Copy

Geometry Copier Basics

The above document walks through how to leverage the Publish Geometry features created with the Geometry Publisher. The Geometry Copier creates external copy geometry features in skeleton PRTs in bulk and using standard naming conventions (defined in the organization Settings). 

User-Defined Copies

Sometimes organizations don't have write-access to component features they need to reference as copy geometries. CadActive allows for a workaround for this use case, called the User-Defined Copy.

Updating Placement Location

The above document walks through how to easily update Copy Geometry locations in the skeleton when components inevitably get re-arranged and move around in the design.

Re-Parenting References

Sometimes during a design cycle, you need to change which is the parent assembly of features within a skeleton. Re-Parenting can be done both down to a lower assembly level or up to a higher assembly level.

Further Modifying Skeletons

Fix Naming Conventions

Once your skeleton model is populated, there are easy ways to rename multiple features with CadActive.

Working with Skeletons

Once you have a populated skeleton model, it can sometimes be difficult navigating through all the features. Luckily, there are some good out-of-the-box ways Creo can handle this.