When to use an Assembly over a Part Studio

randy_8

I come from a long history of Autocad, Mechanical Desktop, then Solidworks so i'm having some difficulty understanding the new Part Studio.

I understand the Assembly shows movement between parts which part studio does not.
If I have an assembly of parts to be manufactured and assembled together, which have no relative movement to each other in the final product, is there any advantage to using an assembly over a part studio? 

Can I just create all the parts in part studio and forget about assembly?

Randy

ilya_baran

The main difference is that the part studio will have a single feature history for all the parts.  This is both an advantage and a disadvantage.  The advantage is the ability to easily reference geometry between different parts.  The disadvantage is that with one long history it's often harder to tell what's going on and harder to navigate.  Also regeneration times may be slower: when you make a change to a feature early in the history, we have to regenerate all of the parts.  If you make parts in different part studios, when you make a change in one of them, we don't have to regenerate the others.

Overall, we expect a wide range of workflows, so you'll likely get a feel for what works for you as you build more stuff.

brucebartlett

I am still waiting for drawings and BOM's to see how things will interact but can see a need when creating rigid assembles for creating part instances in the part studio, so that you can have the same part in multiple place's. I think you can do this in SW's weldments but don't use it (I do all weldments in SW's as assemblies). I think I would prefer to do weldments in part studio with Onshape. So when you have an identical part from a mirror, pattern or copy in a part studio you want to see a BOM count for this part on the drawing, also not see it as a new part studio list but see a count next to the part, then as that part changes it becomes it own entity in the list.

Alternatively you just build a segment of your rigid body in the part studio and do your instances in the  assembly, however then you would needed mirroring and patterning the assembly to speed thing up. 

andrew_troup

Is it fair to say that if you want to make an assembly in the real world, you will (most likely) want to go to the extra step of creating an assembly in OnS? (To capture, among other things, the BoM info)

Whereas if the assembly will be (say) purchased from a single source, you could just leave it as a Part Studio entity?

jonathan_stedman

This is how I visualize the process.

The Part Studio is where one designs the 'product' and its various components.  The studio is where the 'design intent' is explored and the actual creation of a design solution is made by the the engineer. 

• Sketches
• parametric dimensions
• driving sketches
• offsets
• tracing jpg
• imported geometry - scanned or 3d models
• Your imagination  on how to make and design components for the remainder of the list

The Assembly  is where a 'product' goes once it has been designed.  The 'assembly' is where one can now test the product to see if it meets all the design intent.  Below is what I imagine the future will be and what flows from the Assembly

• Does it look correct?  (OS  - please give us control of the amount of perspective applied)
• Does it clash?
• Does it move correctly?
• Renderings
• What does it weight?
• Does it mould?
• Drawings
• Perform FEA
• BOM and all that sort of stuff 
• Your imagination on how to 'test' working products for the remainder of the list

However OS currently does not allow any feedback loop between one assembly and another new part studio.  ( Think of SW 'design in assembly' for the sort of similar loop)  There often is a design link between two studios where it would be useful to link design features/cues directly from one studio to another and maybe this is how the feedback can be achieved.  ( I don't think I have expressed this well - sorry)

Jon