Greets all.

Had a few questions re: master model top-down design and performance/efficiency.

In particular, I'm looking for any documentation that might exist that provides info on

the best way to handle (and edit!) large master models.

I (we) do alot of consumer product / plastic part design -- lots of complex surfaces

that the industrial designers like to change half way through a project.. in the office

we use both SW and ProE.  For some reason the ProE guys have never had as much

trouble as we SW folks do in making late-game edits.  I'm wondering if its our master

model approach.

So on our most recent project, we tried the "ProE Approach" lets call it.

This consists of a very light-weight master part that contains all the sketches planes

curves points etc to drive every other feature in what will be the child parts.  The master

contains only the outside (complex) casework solid parts.

We find we're constantly going back into the master to add sketch data to locate some

snap feature we didn't think about when the master was made.. we do this 10 times a day

until all of the 'intelligence' is in the master.

Usually we'd build up the whole product in this master part.. and then spin on children,

make an assembly, and add the non-critical features (features that don't depend on

others) in the child parts... the assembly would be use for interference detection, animations,

BOMs, etc etc.

This time, we're inserting the master part into every child part.. and cutting away what we

don't need.  Seems to be working a charm so far.. but i'm worried what adopting this approach

for larger project might mean.  will the heirarchy become too heavy?  will we need to have

50 parts open to make one change?  etc.

We can't be the first ones to be going through this sort of evaluation.. so where I can i find

info on the most efficient way of doing this?  for example, how much detail should I add

to the master?  should I make the master as big as possible before spitting out child parts?

should I keep the master as light as possible and make all the changes in the child?

if more than one person is working on the project (we have no PDM), who gets control

of the master?  How do you "share" and assign the parts?  how do you get them all back

together with out major reference issues?

Sorry so long-winded.

Thanks!

-Tony