Imported models: Place them on world origin

martin_kopplow202

Hi, 

in automotive design, there is a convention to use the center of the front axle of the car as the origin, and all parts designed top down are located relative to the origin. Importing an additional part derived from the same model would automatically place it in it's accurate location relative to the origin, and after editing, exporting from the root assembly would again make sure they apperar in the right location in the customer's model. That has been working just fine for me on 'old CAD' for the past 25 years or so, and car manufacturers still use this. 

I have tried to import automotive parts to onshape, mostely from Catia. 
They appeared in the Onshape coordinate system far away from the origin, place they were expected to be, in fact so far that 'zoom all' would not even reveal a single pixel of them on the whole screen. I checked with the same files on the 'old CAD' and they import at exactly the right location there.

This leads to importing say a dashboard and then a steering column from the same car, and they appear a 100m apart in Onshape. That makes no sense. 

Why is it that happening? All CAD files must have an origin, so why isn't Onshape just placing the imported model's origin on the Onshape origin,by default, if not otherwise specified by the user? 

Best,
Martin

john_mcclary

They usually will follow whe origin, you may need to contact support and share your document with them. 

NeilCooke

@martin_kopplow202 - I'm sure it is working as I use this method all the time with automotive customers. When you add parts to an assembly they will float unless you mate them to the origin which requires a mate connector at the origin in the Part Studio.

martin_kopplow202

Well, i see, though that answers my question only half way: Parts I get from say Catia do not usually come with a mate connector (Which I consider an Onshape only property), so I would have to add the mate connector in every added parts part studio? That sounds like a lot of work to me, work that is not needed in 'old CAD', where I would just hit the 'import' button, and a hundred parts I selected in the file selector dialogue would just fall into place. Adding mate connectors is probably prone to errors with the placement, too. Isn't there a fully automated way? 

NeilCooke

In that case, don’t mate them and just fix or group them all at the top level. If you move your mouse around when inserting then of course they won’t be at the origin - instead just press the green check mark on the insert dialog and they will place correctly (but will still move unless constrained). 

NeilCooke

If you just imported the top level assembly then they will be in the correct locations already. 

NeilCooke

If this is not the case, we can do a screen share (instead of sharing the docs) and you can show me what you are seeing. DM me if you would like to do this.