Creating Configurations and Managing Bodies for a Clean and Accurate Playground Assembly Model

All right, in this video we are going to delete all the unnecessary bodies in our playground and we are also going to create a configuration that extends the beams that will travel into the ground when we actually assemble this thing. So before we get started,  double check that you have 189 solid bodies. Double check, make sure that every single one of your bodies is visible.

Scroll through, find anything hidden like this fillet for instance and reveal it. And double check that all of your bodies that are meant to be colored green are indeed colored green. Let's kind of move through this a little bit slowly.

Please check these green bodies against your own model. All right, now we get to the point where we validate why we've been coloring green bodies this entire time. So let's go to delete keep body.

Select every body that is green. We're going to keep those bodies and delete everything else. Remember the green bodies are the unique bodies.

We want to keep those. We'll first switch to keep bodies and we'll move through and select every single body that is green. If you want,  you can start left to right, top to bottom.

You can do it in sections like all the beams first or the ladder parts first. Whatever you think is going to be easiest for you to make sure you capture everything that is green. Just go ahead, grab all those bodies like so.

If you believe you've selected everything green, there should be nothing green in your graphics area. Instead, there should just be a series of glowing blue features. Let's go ahead and close out the feature.

All right, now if you want to double check your work and I recommend doing this, you can go back into that feature that you just made, delete keep body. Instead of selecting keep, select delete. Now is your chance to go through to see if you missed anything.

I missed this panel here, this panel here, and a couple panels here. Great, I'm glad I did that. So I'm going to go back and delete keep.

I'm going to go back into the feature and I'm going to locate those features. And the reason I couldn't locate them is because they were hiding behind things there. All right, here we go.

That one right there. All right, I've got this panel here and this panel over the right. Yes, it is hidden by that panel.

All right, we'll come back to that. There we go. There we go.

There it is. All right, close it out. Once you've double checked your work,  there should be no green bodies left.

All right, now that you've done that, go back into that feature and switch from delete bodies to keep bodies. This is our completed master model. Let's go ahead and save our work.

All right, just so you know, we deleted many bodies. Now we have 64 unique bodies left. These are all going to become 64 unique part files in and of themselves.

Now, before we start building these into parts, there's one last thing we're going to do. If we go two notches over from our feature manager into configuration manager,  we have the toolkit necessary to create new configurations. And what a configuration is,  is a design alteration or a design re-expression of what's showing in your part file.

Let me show you what I mean. If we right click on this part right here, this yellow piece and click add configuration, we'll call this extended beams. Go ahead and do this on your own as well.

Close it up. Next, I'm going to build a new feature. Let's go to the bottom of this beam here, this surface, convert that entity.

I'm going to grab this other beam bottom,  convert that entity. Do I have any other beams? Nope, that's it. And I'm going to extend that feature out, blind, let's call it eight inches down, leave merge result checked,  and we'll make sure we just merge to this body and this body, and we'll close it out.

All right. So, if we go back to the configuration manager, in this configuration, we added a new feature. Now, if we zoom on in this beam, if I double click this other configuration that already existed,  which is called default, yep, rebuild, that new feature goes away.

But let's take a look at our feature manager. It still exists in our feature manager, but it's unexpressed. In other words, the term is suppressed.

It's a suppressed feature. Now, we could right click it and unsuppress it, and it would be available in both the default configuration and the extended beams. You see how nothing changed? But we don't want to do that.

We want our design to change from configuration to configuration to configuration. So, in the default, let's right click and suppress that extended beam feature, but leave it expressed or unsuppressed in the extended beam feature. Take some time and double click these features and make sure that yours are updating in the same way that mine is.

All right. Let's leave it set to the extended beams feature and save our work. Now that we've created all the videos required to complete the midterm,  it's now time to prepare your model for midterm submission.

And here's how we're going to do that. Go to the appearances tab, right click on your green gloss plastic and go to edit appearance. Go down to this abstract color wheel and pick a random color, any color you want.

Once you've done that, click the green check mark. There you go. Next, bring up your view cube.

Select this isometric corner here so that we see the view just like this,  and then use your scroll wheel or your arrow keys to move it randomly in one direction. Once you've done that, take a screenshot of this or rather we'll go to file, save as,  save as a pdf and submit that pdf for your midterm submission.