NX | Tips and Tricks | Select Similar Faces

By Jamie Tyler

Welcome back to the latest NX™ software Tips and Tricks episode. In this episode, we’ll be looking at Select Similar Faces: a tool enabling you to find, select and operate on similar geometrical regions.

NX | Tips and Tricks | Select Similar Faces | Part one

NX | Tips and Tricks | Select Similar Faces | Part two

NX | Tips and Tricks | Select Similar Faces | Part three

NX | Tips and Tricks | Select Similar Faces | Part four

It’s a great tool to use when the building blocks or parametric features that enable search and selection of faces or region of faces match either similar or identically.

Watch the selection of videos above, or if you prefer to read, scroll on further to learn more 📚

How Select Similar Faces works

The Select Similar Faces tool is found from the Selection Toolbar > More > Select Similar Faces and the tool dialog box will appear. You can either select the tool from start and select the face regions required or you can start the tool while in a feature with a face selection input.

A shape region is a single face or group of connected faces. You can select a shape region in the graphics window and initiate the search. The faces of the selected face region must be connected.

The search result is a list of shape regions that are geometrically similar to the input shape region. NX highlights the results in the graphics window. A check box will appear for each shape region in the list and in the graphics window. You can clear the corresponding check box to deselect a shape region. If a shape region is a group of faces, you can also select specific faces in the region.

You can also refine the search to select only those shape regions that are an exact geometric match to the input shape region. To do this, select the Identical Faces check box. This option is available only for Search Selected Faces and Search Reuse Region Object types of input.

Shape region library

You can also use the Select Similar Faces command to search faces in a part or assembly that are geometrically similar to a shape region in a predefined library.

Use the Shape Region Category in the Reuse Library to build and manage the library of commonly used shape regions. The default shape region library contains shape regions that are useful in the Modeling application. You can create custom shape region libraries.