Incontext

billy2

What is it?

"The ability to design in context within an assembly". Or, more easily stated "Designing in an assembly".

As a design engineer I want all the parts in front of me while I'm designing. All parametric modelers  use assemblies as engineering layouts so incontext is a very important piece of the design process.

When do I use multi-bodies in a part studio and when do I use an incontext reference in an assembly? No one knows yet how this division will breakdown and we'll all have to figure out strategies when architecting new projects. Onshape is nothing like solidworks and solidwork's strategies must be redefined to harness onshape's new capabilities. 

Incontext defined:

Above is a biaxial fixture that stretches rubber samples in 2 directions simultaneously. The highlighted rubber component in the feature tree with the left arrow (incontext marker) was created in the assembly.

Change the assembly:

Above when I move the force gauge upward, the links move and the rubber changes it's size. The rubber piece, by itself, doesn't know how big it's suppose to be and must have access to the assembly. The rubber piece has an incontext reference to the assembly.

How to create incontext:

In the assembly, pick the rubber part, RMB and click on edit in context. Onshape switches to the rubber part studio and ghosts the assembly. Create a sketch like any other sketch and create 2 concentric references with the ghost assembly parts. The cyan colored concentric sketch constraints point to the assembly. Cyan colored constraints indicate that these references are from outside the sketch. This is a clue when working with incontext references. As the assembly moves, these 2 constraints update causing the rubber to change it's size.

Update context:

So I moved the force gauge again and the rubber piece didn't update. That's because you have to tell onshape to update the context. I know you'd want it to animate the rubber part while dragging the assembly, but believe me, this isn't what you want. Having multiple contexts and controlling when these update is new and exciting.

Onshape's incontext is much different than any other parametric modeler. I believe it has tremendous power and will allow project architectures far superior than any others we've constructed in the past. To me, onshape was born yesterday with the introduction of incontext.

Looking forward to digging in and defining cool project architectures for great products.

shashank_aarya

billy2 said:

 Create a sketch like any other sketch and create 2 concentric references with the ghost assembly parts. The cyan colored concentric sketch constraints point to the assembly. Cyan colored constraints indicate that these references are from outside the sketch. This is a clue when working with incontext references. 

 I used to work in assemblies created in Pro-Engineer wildfire-4 (Now it is Creo). But while editing the parts inside assemblies it was very painful task to work with references because in Creo identifying the references requires seperate dialogue box to be opened. But I am very much happy with the color differentiation provided in Onshape which makes editing very easily.
Thanks for sharing the information!

billy2

shashank-

It's important to be able to follow these references and understand their assignments especially if you've inherited a design from someone else. Tracking these references and controlling them is critical especially when projects become larger and more people are added.

I stopped using PTC stuff around release 17, that was a long time ago.

shashank_aarya

@billy2  Yes. I do agree. Proper identification of references is the most important thing when we are dealing with bigger assemblies handled by more number of people in collaboration.