Greetings! Our company is trying to establish a recommended modeling technique for larger, more complicated molded assemblies. While not consumer goods, these systems do usually consist of complex surfaced injection molded exteriors with internal components like PCB’c, water valves, etc…

One thing were trying to identify is how far we take our master model files. Everyone seems to be onboard with the exterior surfacing/shape, however, we’re testing out adding more detail upstream. Reason being: our systems have an increasing about of functional features that interact with each other, from part to part. (Nesting parts, tight interactions, snap features, boss locations, etc…) In an ideal world those features are linked to each other to ensure the interactions stay aligned and updated. However, some systems have so many interactions that we’ve almost designed the entire system in the master part file before we split it out. This frustrates some because the ability have multiple designers work on various parts seems to diminish because so much work has been done in the master file.

How do we balance the desire to have multiple people work on one system, yet gain the robustness of linking internal components, not just the exterior shape? Thoughts anyone?