When I assign a material (Side bar, Properies) to a component that has several sub components, I'd like the material to be assigned to all the sub components in one go.

How else would you want to get the mass of a roller bearing with 65 rollers? Assign the material to each individual roller? 

 Unfortunately Spaceclaim cannot give me the mass of an assembly unless all of the components have a valid material property ... 

Martin 

 Hello Martin,

I'd like to first present you with a couple techniques to help in this situation, then I'll address your enhancement request.

First off, you can select any number of components and/or bodies in the Structure tree and apply material properties to the entire selection at once.  Selection in the Structure tree even works with CTRL+click and Shift+click slections like in Windows.  This way you can quickly select a large number of entities that you would like to adjust the properties of in one operation.

Secondly, and more specific to your roller example, you can use a pattern to create the 65 instances of your roller.  Now when you change the material properties of one member of the pattern, the other 64 should follow.

Now to your original request.  As I understand it, you would like the material selection to cascade down from parent component to all child sub-component. There are a few considerations to be made.  Does the property only cascade to the immediate children of the component, or to all nested sub-assemblies?  Does it over-ride existing materials on child sub-components? What happens when you drag a sub-component into or out of a parent with a material property defined?

I ask these questions both to illustrate that the enhancement may not be as simple as it seems, but also to gather real feedback as to how Development should handle these questions.  Any further input?

Regards,

James Saunders

Hello James, 

 You wrote: 

"Secondly, and more specific to your roller example, you can use a pattern to create the 65 instances of your roller.  Now when you change the material properties of one member of the pattern, the other 64 should follow."

Now, that would be true if I was a roller bearing designer, but I'm not. I just import this kind of parts say from TraceParts, and then need to assign a material to all it's sub components so I can calculate the mass of my whole design. Spaceclaim does not output any mass unless all of the components selected have a material assigned to them. Given Spaceclaim was meant to modify models rather than create them, I'd just like to see a simple way to do this fast. 

It seems there are already differences between the current and the previous release, where the solids, not the components needed to be selected. That appears to have improved after the update.

 As for cascading down: Yes, I think that would help at times, maybe as an option. When I assign a material, it would cascade down the whole branch on request, and when I move a part out of the component, I think I would expect the material to stick to the part. Cascade-assigning  a new material to the next higher level would then probably overwrite all below, that would probabbly not surprise me. In such cases, we could still not use the cascade option.

Regards,

Martin