About the Freeze Bar
The Freeze Bar was my favorite feature in 2012. Until, that is, I started using it. It was one of the things that was supposed to show up in 2011, but reportedly wasn’t ready. It got a lot of scrutiny in the Beta forums, but what was delivered is not, in my opinion, usable in real-world modeling.
The Freeze Bar is supposed to lock the features of a model at a point in time so things don’t change. It was supposed to offer peace of mind that your part has the stability of an imported part, with the option of being able to go back and thaw out features later to make changes. The concept was beautiful, the execution has more loopholes than corporate tax code.
Maybe a little intro to Freeze is needed first. Freeze is not enabled by default. Maybe SolidWorks learned a lesson with the mistakes made in 2008 by turning a bunch of dangerous options on by default in the new version. I hope they learned from those mistakes. The setting is at Tools>Options>General>Enable Freeze Bar.
When it shows up, it is a bar, just like the Roll Back bar, but it starts at the top of the FeatureManager. As you pull it down, you can see the features lock, as shown on the right.
I should say that I’ve only tried to use this on one model. The model I tried to use it on had some severely ugly workarounds for the Shell feature. I was shelling out a block of plastic with holes drilled in it. Shell wouldn’t work, so I shelled the block without the holes, and then made the holes as volumes and used the volumes with the Indent tool to make a shelled version. It had 200 features, and a 10 second rebuild time. I used the Freeze bar because the features were seriously fragile, and recreating them was not an attractive option.
I should note here, that Solid Edge would not have any of these problems. There would be no need to freeze the model or fear it becoming unstable. With Sync Tech, the model is always stable, because the intelligence is in the software, not in the model itself. When the model has its own brain, it can do things like change when you don’t intend it to.
Anyway, once I froze the model, I realized I needed to do some editing. For example, there was a rebuild symbol on a feature that was frozen. Well, you didn’t want it to update, so what is that symbol doing there? Why didn’t it do its updating before it froze? It wouldn’t go away. C’mon, guys. Use your heads. Don’t put a perpetual rebuild symbol on a feature that you have told the software specifically not to update. It’s just teasing the obsessive nature of the people who run this software. It’s cruel. It’s like a scratch on a new car.
The problem is easy to recreate. Just double click on a feature, and double click on a dimension, change it, click the green check to get out of the Modify box, and then pull the Freeze bar over it. I’m not sure that’s how it happened originally, but that’s how I can recreate it right now. The symbol probably got there through the in-context feature that was on the part, which was one of the reasons I froze it to begin with. Something about the in-context references changed, and the rebuild symbol appeared, and now the model has lost a good bit of its usefulness.
Now, with the rebuild symbol frozen in the tree, say that you might need to get the mass properties of the part. Well, you can’t do that. Bummer. That rebuild flag is just a fly in the ointment.
Maybe you could at least apply an Appearance, right? Nope. Can’t do that either. No message, no nothing. Just can’t do it. When you drag an appearance onto the part from the Task Pane, there is no response. If you use the Appearance option from the RMB menu, you can edit the appearance, so you can change color, but you can’t apply, say Polished Aluminum.
Next, if you have to thaw out the model, there are no RMB options to do that. The only way to do it is to drag the bar. I’ve got a big monitor, but I’ve also got 200 features in this part. Scroll, click 3 times to finally select the bar, then drag. Do they have people writing code who have never seen this software before? Why the Freeze bar doesn’t work just like the Roll Back bar with RMB options is a bit of a mystery to me.
I was at a user group meeting last night where a guy who a lot of people might know in the north east was describing his experience in having SolidWorks actually add one of the features that he suggested. But when they added the feature, they completely over-did it, and lost the intent of what he needed the feature to do. So he closed it down, and never used that feature again. I’ve had the same sort of experience with the Freeform, and now the Freeze.
These are the few things I’ve found about the Freeze Bar in using it for about an hour. Does anyone else have any experience with this function, good or bad?
@matt
very well put. after experiencing all the frustrations you mentioned with freezebar, I found your points voiced the obvious flaws in another introduced SW feature that hasn’t been tested properly before release.
My other favourite is when you check ‘Suspend Automatic Rebuild’ & you watch in shock and awe as your assembly proceeds to rebuild. 🙂
Overall though, I like the software. I’m sure these issues will work great when they get sorted.
If you leave the VERY LAST feature NOT frozen in a part, you can drag and drop the appearance onto a face of that feature and STILL apply the appearance to the ENTIRE part.
I tried this in the actual part file that was frozen AND after sticking that part into an assembly.
Seems like a possible “bug” though that you can’t do it when the WHOLE tree is frozen…
But it makes sense sort of also…
You would think they could make it just default to applying the appearance to the ENTIRE PART if it was frozen, rather than wanting to pop up the toolbar asking what to apply it to, which doesn’t pop up when the part is frozen…
I am testing SW 2012 for our company. There seems to be no way of rolling down the feature freeze bar below any folders.
“The freeze bar cannot be moved to the selected position due to one or more absorbed features”
If I delete the folders, I can then roll below the features that were within the folders. Am I missing something or is this another example of SW adding functionality and stopping just short of usefulness? I work with parts that have 300 to 1000 features, so folders are important.
I also have similar issues, but try it on a part with 3500 steps, that has several areas of SW instability due to surfacing or junk workarounds….worked tons better, and properly in IDEAS when they first put it out.
Time for a change me thinks!!
@CBL
What kinda stuff are you building CBL? Can you post a picture of the type of model you do that results in that hefty feature tree?
Along the lines of the freeze feature, does anyone remember the “Redlight” macro. I found this to work well when re-arranging features in the model tree. This is one of the places where the current freeze is lacking.
Unfortunately the last copy I have seen on this was a compiled 32 bit exe.
@Devon
Ahhahahaha… Rebuilding… That’s funny. Ive found it’s practically impossible to rebuild a part document that big soundly no matter how robustly you constrain the model. Features are 99.99% guaranteed to go haywire like flipping a trim or a sketch feature goes over defined or dangling for no reason and resolves very poorly blowing up the tree— one feature that i wish i could use is heal edge. It works really well but it always constantly forces a rebuild (even right after a forced rebuild)! and honestly I just cant afford losing time with fixing trees to 100%
This is why ive started to do my DD with history free modeling in NX and synchronous tech as it would probably save us alot of time and we would still reap the benefits of the parasolid modeling kernal.
Our workstations are pretty fast. Open and saving takes <1 to 2 sometimes up to 5 to 10 minutes at the most, depending on the model, it can take much longer.
@neil
I've tried multiple times with contacting my VAR and submitting ER's about these issues and they still don't get fixed on SP's and new versions. Not worth the energy anymore if the workarounds get my job done at the end of the day.
@CBL if its intended behaviour it probably didnt make it to the documention like a few other things 😉
I would guess its something to do with opening the file in a fully updated/self aware state first.
Probably it would be convenient to have an option to do that automatically when you open the file?
‘This file was saved in a frozen state do you want to update and refresh the freeze?’ or such…dunno…maybe its a bug and needs a SR rather than an ER.
Perhaps you should post the issue to SW forums where it might attract the attention of some SW benevolent employee in the know.
We did have one good SW fairy bailed up here for a while but they are rather delicate and evasive creatures….
@CBL
1400 features (!) how long do you wait when you Rebuild & Save? How long to Open this file? What are your computer specifications?
Thanks,
Devon
So I played around with it some more and figured out the glitches with it. If you had saved a part document in an already roll backed state it’ll limit how far you can bring down the freeze bar randomly stopping at whatever point, most of my files were stopped at between 100 and 200 features down. After I drug the rollback bar all the way to the end of the tree (doesn’t work if you only roll forward a few features, HAS TO roll all the way to the end) THEN the freezebar can drag down as far down as possible on the tree, so if you save your file in rollback mode and try to use the freezebar it’ll limit how much you can freeze, at least on my feature rich part files. Would love some confirmation from other users if this is also happening to them.
CBL, is that related to any specific feature or is it just the number? perhaps try reordering some features as an experiment.
Interesting thing to note on the freeze bar. I tried using it for the first time on a 1400 feature part file and it wouldn’t let me drag it father down than 200 features into the tree. Am I missing something or is this a limitation? I tried dragging it all at once, dragging it in sections it just wont budge past 200 features or so.
It doesn’t make alot of sense to limit how far you can freeze down a feature tree if this tool is best utilized for heavy feature tree part documents.
Thanks, Matt. Nice hack in avoiding the references issue—I’ve used that trick before in slightly different contexts, but sometimes in-context relations (such as sketch entities) go dangling even after restoring the file name to the original. But then again, I’ve not used the freeze bar feature before, so maybe “this time it’s different”.
@Rick McWilliams
Rick, yeah, it’s a total bandaid, but it does give some control where we used to have little. It’s an improvement, but lots more needs to be done. Not sure we’re gonna see the day when it gets what it needs.
I use an older version of Solidworks. It seems to me that freeze is a bandaid over the problem of totally unnecessary rebuilds. Solidworks seems to create parent / child dependencies that are completely unnecessary.
It is a scary to think of a time where models might be integrated into an inscrutable database. One little bit of corruption and the entire project is at risk. At least now we can hide models in other subdirectories, safe from new rebuild errors.
Matt, well I remember they were quite keen to move on after the initial showing in the forum. I questioned at the time if they were committed to doing anything with the feedback. It was really only the insistent objections of a few users including yourself that got it held over for more work… Now its apparent that actually nothing may have been done other than to hide it from the UI for a release for sensitivity reasons. Certainly the effort during a year didn’t extend to changing the icon, something that didn’t require any coding at all.
My gut instinct tells me this was a sham/scam. Would love to compare the code to confirm that suspicion.
I imagine practically all of SW resources were tied up by the cloud development even then and they were already getting by drawing on scraps still in the pipeline. That explains why 2012 was such a poor release all round. I’m not happy at all with SW or how Freeze turned out, not that they will give a ___ about that. 🙁
@Jeff Mowry
Jeff, the incontext change will signal a flag in the frozen tree. The flag won’t update, but it will be there on the feature manager for the frozen part.
If you have external references, I would freeze the part, and then change the names of the externally referenced parts, with the frozen part closed. This way you should never get a rebuild flag, but if you needed to, you could change the name of the reference back and unfreeze the part.
I haven’t tested all the scenarios, but I don’t have a great feeling about this one. It might take as long as it took to get the Split feature correct, which was several releases.
Thanks for the details on this feature, Matt. It’s something about which I’ve had many unanswered questions.
What happens if you’re creating a master part (which will later be broken into child parts)—something typically quite feature-heavy—that necessarily must refer to in-context assembly geometry, at least during the initial build? Will the freeze bar work with the features that have in-context relations? If so, what happens if that in-context geometry changes while locked? When unlocked?
My ideal situation for this feature is consistent/predictable results, allowing me to avoid the continual rebuilding of geometry that’s already settled/solved—and thereby avoiding a lot of wasted time. But if the model ends up getting unpredictable or unworkable, and trashes hundreds of downstream features, then the Freeze feature isn’t something I’d be able to use. I even have some cases in which a CTRL-Q type rebuild will alternately trash or fix some features in some models (software bugs). Ideally, I’d get those features to rebuild properly and then freeze them. I wonder if this practice would be effective for parts like this (generally surface-heavy parts)?
@Steve O
Steve, it looks like if you drop the appearance on the part, there is no reaction, with the toolbar for selecting face, feature, body or part if it is frozen past a certain point.
I just tried it on a different model, and it rebuilt a rebuild symbol before freezing it. So it’s inconsistent. Inconsistent stuff is worse than stuff that is obviously broken, because inconsistent stuff never gets fixed. It’s as if the user not being able to 100% identify something is excuse enough to not fix it.
@Neil
I think they probably changed something between 2011 and 2012, but it’s possible that they just didn’t bother to fix anything after beta. That’s pretty common. It certainly wasn’t 100% vetted by people actively trying to break it.
Matt, did you see this SW forum topic? https://forum.solidworks.com/thread/51043
What do you think of the likelihood that little or nothing was actually done to Freeze between beta and release? I don’t have SW2011 and 2012 to compare but it might be interesting….
I’m not sure where the Appearance problem is coming from. I’m able to change Appearances on a frozen model any time just by dragging it out into the graphics area or onto a face.
[img]http://www.dezignstuff.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/FreezeAppearances.jpg[/img]
Also, even though you can’t RMB on a frozen feature and get the bar to roll there, you can RMB on the Freeze bar itself to have it go back to the top of the FM and unfreeze all.
When I see these in a SolidWorks Feature Tree, I’m reminded about all the extra work required to create surface models in SolidWorks.
Devon
[img]http://www.dezignstuff.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/workarounds.png[/img]
I’ve been fairly satisfied with the Freeze Bar. I have models that, even with my 3.5GHz Sandy Bridge Xeon, still take many minutes to rebuild. They do keep them from rebuilding unnecessarily, from my testing. I haven’t built a model like that from scratch recently, so I can’t say what it’s like on a new model. I have used it on new models and never been greatly disappointed.
I do not like the fact that I can’t change the appearance of a frozen model. I consider that a minor inconvenience.
Thanks for saving me a few hours of confusion, teeth gnashing, and garment tearing.
Maybe they’ll fix it in a “Service Pack” LOL!
Devon