Creo Explained – Part 4

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I started Creo Direct and created a simple part, basically a box with a hole.

I did this by drawing a rectangle, extruding it to a box, drawing a circle on the top face and cutting a hole. The model tree in Creo Direct looked like this.

No extrude features, just a couple of sketches. I then saved the part and opened it in Creo Parametric. The model tree there looked like this.

As you can see, the two extrude features showed up. So these features were created in Creo Direct automatically. Next I applied a round to the hole in Creo Parametric.

As expected a round feature was added to the model tree in Creo Parametric.

I saved the part and opened it in Creo Direct and did two things to it there. I changed the radius of the round using push-pull direct modeling and moved the hole towards a corner of the box using the 3D CoPilot.

I still didn’t see any features added to the model tree in Creo Direct.

Now let’s see what happened to the model tree when I took the part back to Creo Parametric.

Two new features were added – an Edit Round and a Move. Note that Creo Direct didn’t edit the existing round feature and change its radius. Instead it added an Edit Round feature after it. I’ll remind you about this a little later.

So basically the software let me thrash around the model in Creo Direct and it added features in the model tree as necessary, without me knowing it. Note that it did not edit any existing features. This proves that Creo Direct is pretty much the same thing as Creo Parametric but without the history based parametric modeling exposed to the user.

In a post titled “Direct Modeling In Creo” I pointed to this article by Al Dean and wrote:

So as I guessed eight months ago and as Al understands it today, PTC has implemented Direct Modeling in Creo by simply automating the process of adding features to the bottom of the feature tree. If that is indeed the case then, then in my opinion, Creo is hardly a breakthrough in 3D modeling technology. But as Al points out, who gives a shit, as long as users can get their job done and this method of direct modeling solves more problems than it creates.

In the next part of this series I will dig a little deeper into PTC’s implementation of Direct Modeling and let you decide whether it solves more problems that it creates or not.

Part 5 >>