Update / resolution
A follow-up for anyone who runs into this. Aras Support confirmed it is standard behavior. It is not a conversion problem and it is not specific to Solid Edge Part Copy.
- The conversion itself is fine. The tasks complete successfully, the viewable contains the part's body, and the standard 3D Viewer shows it correctly.
- The Dynamic Viewer builds the scene when it opens, by reading the CAD Structure. Innovator treats any CAD item that has CAD Structure rows as an assembly, and in the Dynamic Viewer an assembly's own geometry is not displayed. Only its children are shown.
- So a derived part whose source part is linked as a CAD Structure child shows only the source body. One level is enough to reproduce this; you don't need a 2-level chain.
- We confirmed it on clean test data. If we remove the CAD Structure row, the Dynamic Viewer immediately shows the correct shape without any re-conversion. If we add the row back, the problem comes back.
Workarounds: use the standard 3D Viewer for these parts, or don't store the Part Copy source as a CAD Structure child of the derived part (e.g. adjust the CAD connector/save logic, or model the relationship as a separate assembly that contains both parts, as Aras suggested).
My second question is still open: has anyone seen the same thing with other CAD connectors that add derived-part sources to CAD Structure (SolidWorks, Inventor, NX)? I'd expect the same behavior there.
Thanks, Marco.
