PATRAN Order of Operations

To preface this question, almost all of my FEA experience has come from SolidWorks, so I haven’t had to deal with these types of problems.

I’m designing a truss structure in PATRAN composed of 1D line elements.

At some point, I have to do the following two things:

• Mesh each individual line to create nodes
• Apply properties (material, cross-section, stiffness) to curves

Sometimes I apply the properties first, but when I attempt to mesh PATRAN tells me “Curve is in property xyz which does not support Bar2.”

Sometimes I mesh first, but when I analyze the truss my results file is sometimes empty. I can’t tell what distinguishes when it works and when it doesn’t.

In which order should I do these?