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Let's talk about assemblies
Ben_Misegades
Member Posts: 133 ✭✭✭
Rather than making improvement requests about some of this stuff, I'd be curious to hear other people's feedback on some of these assembly-related items:
1. Mating. So far, mating things in an assembly has presented itself as a bit of a headache.
4. Manipulation of inserted parts and assemblies. How do I rotate inserted parts and assemblies? Once I've inserted a new component into my assembly, it is free to be dragged around the screen but its orientation in regard to XYZ axis seems locked in place and only changes when a mate causes it to. Am I missing something?
What are other users' thoughts?
1. Mating. So far, mating things in an assembly has presented itself as a bit of a headache.
- There is no real option to use Planes to mate, which in my experience is probably the best way to mate parts and subassemblies to each other as they are completely independent from geometry.
- It is currently not possible to create assembly-level sketches, which means if you want sketch-driven assembly mates, you have to create a separate part that contains any sketches you may want to use. While this works, it seems like an extra step to take that ought not be necessary.
- Mate connectors are an interesting idea, and I'm sure that I will 'unlock' more of their capabilities the more that I use them, but I don't feel like they should completely replace "traditional" mating. I was just trying to mate two parts together using a sketch line from one part and a sketched arc from the other part, and I just can't get it to work, OS doesn't seem to want me to connect to the arc itself, but rather only the center point of that arc. I am 100% open to the possibility of me simply not doing it right, but if there is a correct way to do this in OS, it sure isn't presenting itself very readily.
- So far I haven't figured out an easy way to quickly place multiple instances of a part into my assembly. From the "Insert Parts and Assemblies" interface it seems I have to pick an item, place it, pick an item again, place it, etc. There also doesn't seem to be a way to quickly grab a part that's already placed in your assembly and insert another, either from the tree or from the actual modeling area. Ctrl-drag a la Solidworks, for example.
- Inserting parts with or without sketches. My mind can't quite wrap itself around the concept that I can pull a part into an assembly, but then not have access to sketches that created the geometry of that part. If I tick the option to insert the sketches of that part as well, the sketches are not constrained to that part unless I group the sketch with its part.
4. Manipulation of inserted parts and assemblies. How do I rotate inserted parts and assemblies? Once I've inserted a new component into my assembly, it is free to be dragged around the screen but its orientation in regard to XYZ axis seems locked in place and only changes when a mate causes it to. Am I missing something?
What are other users' thoughts?
1
Comments
I don't believe SW got assemblies right so I wouldn't try and copy that style. It's just too maveric.
-OS uses mate connectors which modern CAD systems are adopting to reduce mate count. This is a good thing.
-OS needs planes in an assy. Add a mate connector to the origin. I agree about the planes in an assy.
-I find OS mate connectors different and eventually very good. The benefit is a clean assy structure.
-SW can RMB and rotate part, OS you can select the manipulator and rotate part.
-OS uses the manipulator a lot. Sectioning, dragging extrusions and it works well.
-dragging the manipulator on top of some geometry does update its orientation. SW some times it worked, mostly not.
-OS instances aren't difficult not sure about this problem.
Bottomup assemblies inside OS are good and takes a little getting use to. It's really clean once it's done removing 1000's of mates from that horrible mate folder listing. Trying to understand how an assy is put together is refreshing in OS not so fun in SW.
Topdown assemblies in both OS & SW is lacking a lot of understanding. OS now has all the tools to create well structured projects, we just need to figure out the style. The lack of topdown style in SW doesn't help over here. We'll figure this out in the OS community and hopefully create a universe of well crafted projects.
I'm curious why you didn't mention the indecisions as to when to use part studios, incontext or derived? These are the struggles today.
Being able to walk into any company and work on any project should be real. In the SW arena there's 1000's of schemes that have to be learned before you can begin working on a project which really makes it frustrating. Most projects have dozens of schemes just inside one project. Every engineer is allowed to build using his own style making the maintenance of a project next to impossible. Inheriting someone else's project is a nightmare in SW.
There's hope here at OS, SW is beyond repair.
Just a another user's perspective,
You can add offsets to mates and mate connectors, so one thing you could try is to position a mate connector where you would want a plane. Then you can mate to that point using a 'fixed', 'planar', or other type, and apply any offsets, rotations, etc. the same way you would a plane. You can also mate to the origin, so you can mate with offsets, etc. to there as well.
As far as placing multiple instances into an assembly, if you click on the part multiple times in the insert dialog, it will put in one instance for each click. The only problem is it places them all on top of each other. You can also copy/paste parts using ctrl-c/ctrl-v or a mouse right-click. The 'Replicate' tool can be really useful for things like bolts, that may help you save some time for some cases.
If you need to rotate or position parts, click on the part once and you should see the triad manipulator on the screen. You can then use that to move the part any way you want. Once you start moving it with the manipulator, it also allows you to enter in a precise value for the movement.
In regard to you saying SW didn't get assemblies right, I can't make much comment as I don't know how other packages go about assemblies. SW assemblies, for the most part, worked quite well for me, but I don't have much of anything to compare to.
As to comments regarding part studios vs. incontext vs. derived, I haven't said anything yet because I haven't messed around with those enough yet to formulate a good opinion. From looking at incontext and derived parts, what it accomplishes isn't much different than what I'm used to doing in SW, it just goes about it in a different way. I don't think any of them are a big deal, honestly, but I'll withhold actual opinions until I've played with them.
As was also explained by @robert_morris in regard to instances, I simply wasn't aware of how to do it the OS way, so I thank you both for the explanations.
I'm a little touchy about putting assemblies/projects together.
The "tri-ball" was the 1st triad and tri-spectives tried to copy right it. They couldn't copyright it. Now everyone has a triad. OS's is very good.
Give the manipulator a chance, it works really well.
The RMB spins about the screen coordinates which is related to the way you're looking at the model. The manipulators works about known axis and rotates in a knowing fashion. I know this is a weak argument for spinning using the manipulator but it's best I can come with.
OS is different and it needs to be, give it a chance.
The reason I'm not too keen about using the triad manipulator is simply because, at least for the type of work I usually do, it's too slow of a method. Pretty much all of my previous CAD work has been under a huge amount of pressure time-wise, so I've come to appreciate every second that I can shave off while modeling. Picking an axis or plane on the manipulator triad -> too slow. Setting up mate connectors to do the simplest (in my mind) of mates -> too slow. Having to create an additional part studio with sketches rather than using an assembly-level sketch -> too slow. Ad infinitum.
All that having been said, I realize full well that OS is not SW, and I shouldn't expect it to be, I just need to learn how to be as efficient with OS as I am with SW. That's why I haven't made improvement requests for all of this stuff because a fair amount of it isn't necessarily going to be an issue with other users.
I was more keen to see what other people's opinions are, as well as see if I'm simply "doing it wrong" which, as has already been proven, is sometimes the case.
For example I can mate fully functional 6-ax robot into sub-assy and narrow down DOF's in main assembly to be able to simulate the movement.
@ben_misegades435
Have you already mastered with multi-part studios? If there are parts that are static relative to each other, you can create them directly in their position in single part studio and insert whole module into assembly with single click and add one group mate to glue them together. This is real time saver compared to creating parts one by one and using assembly + mates to attach them together.
Learning a new CAD system is frustrating.
In OS build very simple stuff, a 4 bar linkage, a handle something trivial. Crawl before you run.
As 3dcad mentioned, if nothing in your design moves, start with a partstudio. Did you ever use multi-body parts in SW? Partstudios will be more important in OS than multi-body parts are in SW. I'm hoping they'll be part of the project flow.
The problem I had with multi-body parts in SW was how to implement part numbering etc. smoothly, from the looks of things OS will handle this in a better manner. Like you, I'm hoping that part studios will play a greater role in project flows.
I have a friend de-composing all the multi-body parts into parts and it's destroying the assemblies and drawings. You can't tell me that system is whole.
Ever checked out an assembly from a vault and it regenerates. Oh my God! What happened! This has been fixed here. Once you version, it's immutable, it won't change. Small things make big differences.
I've built a lot of projects in many parametric systems and it needs improvement.
Pro/E was the best. It was impossible for most to do, but it was very organized and very structured. The problem was that very few could do it. I ran the Pro/e users group in southern california for 4 years and it's all we talked about. I'm not saying this is where we need to go, because few could figure it out.
Setting up a project to get the needed data out, controlling the structure and allowing changes and supporting down stream processes is what a well constructed project should do.
This is beyond how to puttng 2 parts together in an assembly. It's way out of the scope of your original question. But this is the conversation we should be having.
To me it's more than assemblies, it's about the projects and how assemblies, partstudios, drawings, BOMs, purchased parts, fabricated parts ..... all work together.
One critical aspect of a project is how to allow multiple engineers to work together? Each gets their own assembly right? Then this rolls into a top assembly right? Then you flutter all this through a vault and everything becomes unglued right?
For prismatic parts & assemblies, Currently Onshape is superior to Solidworks.
Stick with it, I think you'll find this to be true.
The problem with assemblies are that they are called assemblies! This means when migrating from other CAD packages, most people assume they are for showing how parts fit together. In OS they are really for showing the motion between parts (or I believe that was OS's original concept......), they should really be called something else, like motion study to encourage people do all design work in a part studio. Unfortunately using derived parts in part studios is much more clunky than doing so in an assembly so .
I wait for a future where i can design everything in a part studio (for something that has no motion) with the benefit of the easy mating from assembly for derived parts (rather than the current workflow -> add derived, add mate connectors, move by mate connectors )
Assembly still is assembly, part studio parts are not mated together if used in higher level assembly so I suppose we all have our own best practices to divide stuff between part studios, sub- and main assemblies according to what is being modeled.
@daniel_poulter At some point I have asked why there is assemblies in first place, I got response from Onshape and this was discussed in the very beginning. The reason is robustness, they wanted to have unbreakable assemblies - and now we have those
Here is the link for the discussion https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/1981/multi-part-studios-in-assemblies
You are absolutely, 100%, amazingly, superior, insightfully correct.
Ok, now how do we make it work?
Didn't we already figure that out? I thought we did, the only problem was that there was only two of us without the need for separate assembly and drawings module - now the group has grown to three - that's 50% growth!
Maybe Onshape 2.0?
I feel sorry for the guy just starting out.