Hello all

For a while now, I've been taking a more "top down" approach to creating some of the products that we build where I work. I start by making a solid that has the faces and geometry that I want, then convert the solid into a multibody sheetmetal 'part' with various methods. This works out alright, but for a number of reasons, I need to make individual part files of each created sheetmetal component. What I have been doing so far is using the "insert into new part" functionality to save out my individual components, but this is beginning to drive me nuts. My multibody sheetmetal part has actual SW sheetmetal components in it, naturally, but when the parts are saved out to separate part files, they become dumb solids. Now I have to take those solids, and once insert bends. This is tedious, but terrible to do. The problem is, I'm finding that SW is not very good at "inserting bends" into parts. What was, at first, a great looking sheetmetal component within my multibody is now an abortion with random, ugly, irritating, an unnecessary bend reliefs and cutouts. (I find it has a tendency to do the same when mirroring sheetmetal parts.

See the below as a quick example:

This first one is an isolated component within my multibody, and is a sheetmetal part that flattens:

This second image is what it looks like after I've inserted it into an individual part file, and used the "Convert to Sheetmetal" feature:

Is there any better way to do this? I feel like I'm going around and around when trying to make individual sheetmetal parts when designing "top down"

I've also tried the "save bodies" functionality to more quickly create my assemblies, but again, it just exports dumb solids.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanks.