Assembly

dan_schwartz

Hello
Can I add planes to assembly?
What is the way to start from layout?
D

philip_thomas

Dan - there are no planes in our assemblies because they are not needed.
Onshape uses Mate Connectors (local coordinate systems) and high level mates.

To orient parts in an assembly you can either;
1) Use the manipulator triad - this includes 'align with z', 'anti align with z' and 'move to origin, OR
2) Mate to the origin (both implicit and explicit mate connectors can be generated at the origin).

That should get you started. 

Are there any specific scenarios that you are struggling with?

samuel_l

How do you activate section view without planes?

philip_thomas

I think this is what you're looking for

https://learn.onshape.com/courses/section-views-of-cylindrical-parts



There are a bunch of awesome technical papers here.

grochino

@guillaume_ethier You can use mate connectors or planar faces as your section plane. If you do not have any planar faces in your assembly, you can add a mate connector to the origin of the assembly.

samuel_l

Great thanks!

andre_brown101

I want to have planes that give a visual boundary to the size of a part, for instance the max permissible height of the parts in the assembly from the ground.  seems like I have to create dummy surfaces for this which is not very efficient when it would have been easy to allow assembly level planes...

S1mon

I agree that not having assembly planes is very hard to get used to coming from other CAD systems. It makes taking some sections impossible, especially on mobile.

That said, the work arounds are to add surfaces as you mentioned, or you can add sketches to the assembly. Constraining the sketches can be a bit of a pain, but that's also possible. You can always drop them in at their position from the part studio and then group them to keep them from floating around. One advantage of a sketch in the assembly is that it doesn't clutter up the BOM.