Optimizing V4 Migration: Deactivation of the Parent Filter of V4 Elements

When copy/pasting V4 space data, duplication of geometries inside a same family is avoided. The main reason is that some elements such as Faces require the migration of underlying entities such as Surfaces, but the Surfaces may also have been migrated explicitly. The purpose is to analyze the set of objects migrated and extracted from the representative entities.

This task shows you how to:

Before you begin: The following elements will no longer be converted:
  1. Border curves of migrated Faces (since they would duplicate face edges).
  2. Surfaces that are support of migrated faces (since they are already migrated as support of the faces).
  3. Faces included in a migrated Skin or Volume (since they have been migrated through the skin or the volume and are accessible through those federating elements).
  4. Volumes and Skins used in migrated solids (solids containing Volume or Skin/split primitives for instances) since they are already migrated through the solid primitive. The deactivation of the No Show filter upon Volumes and Skins is automatic during the copy/paste special using the CATIA_SPEC option (no environment variable is needed).
  5. Elements in Hide, except Solids (SOLIDE or SOLIDM): The management of Hide/Show should be independent from families. However some border effects have convinced us the two behaviors should be associated: for instance if the model contains a Skin in Hide, whereas its faces are in Show space, migrating the Skin and not the Faces separately would not provide the required result.

    This can result in dramatic improvements in terms of conversion performance, memory consumption and 3D Shape size.

    The conversion can be operated on those representative entities only. But these tasks show you that environment variables allow the user to deactivate these filters and to migrate all the V4 features:

    • CATIA V6 behavior without the environment variables (when the filter is activated)
    • CATIA V6 behavior with the environment variables (when the filter is deactivated)

    Note that the element can still be copy-pasted when selected individually, or if the element it belongs to is not migrated in the same transaction.

    This enhancement is automatically in use when copy/pasting V4 space data into a Representation.

    Environment variables are provided to disable this behavior (filters):


    • set KEEP_HIDDEN_ELEMENT=1 disables point 5. above
    • set INACTIVE_QUICK_PASTE=1 : disables point 1. to 3 .

    The following scenarios deal with the second environment variable (set INACTIVE_QUICK_PASTE=1). For more information about the first environment variable, please refer to Optimize V4 Family Migration: Deactivation of the No Show Filter.

CATIA V6 behavior without the environment variables (when the filter is activated)

This task describes the CATIA V6 behavior without the environment variables (when the filter is activated).

  1. Open a model in CATIA V6.



  2. Click Swap visible space to visualize the No Show space:



    The Exact Solid, *SOL7, belongs to a Volume, *VOL1. A Volume is the parent of a Solid. If you copy/paste a *MASTER containing a Volume and a Solid into CATIA V6, only the Solid is copied. As a consequence there are fewer features and there is more geometry.

    Volumes, Faces and Solids are in the Show space. Volumes, Faces and Border Curves are not migrated because they are filtered, but it is possible to select equivalent features such as Edges, Boundary Curves.

  3. Copy *MASTER and paste special it in a 3D Shape using the CATIA_SPEC option (in this mode the BREP of the Solid is migrated).

  4. Update the 3D Shape.



  5. Click Swap visible space :



The copy of the Solid, Solid.1 (*VOL1 -wsp *MASTER-) (VOLM1) is not duplicated but the Solid is still referencing the VOL1.

CATIA V6 behavior with the environment variables (when the filter is deactivated)

This task describes the CATIA V6 behavior with the environment variables (when the filter is deactivated).

  1. You can deactivate the No Show Filter by entering the following command:

    set INACTIVE_QUICK_PASTE=1

  2. Open a model in CATIA V6.

  3. Copy *MASTER and paste special it using the CATIA_SPEC option in a 3D Shape.

  4. Update the 3D Shape.



The Faces allowing the creation of the Volume are migrated into CATIA V6. They are independent features and they are the copies of the ones contained in the PartBody's BREP. As a consequence, this Representation is bigger than the first one above.