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Assemblies - I would love to see planes in assembly mode - what am I missing??
dave_franchino
Member Posts: 71 ✭✭
Hey folks,
I keep pounding my head against the wall in situations where I'd love to have the three primary planes to work with in an assembly. In general they're incredibly useful for cutting sections, assembling, etc.
Lately I'm working on a large assembly with a lot of symmetry - think of a table with (a lot of) legs. I start by assembling the table top (drawn centered at the origin) and I'd love to mate just one leg and them mirror that leg around the front and side planes to end up with a clean assembly that shows the table top and one leg used four times. But there is no way I can find to mirror that first leg around the center of the table top.
I must be missing something because this seems so basic and simple - the Onshape folks are pretty smart and I don't think they'd leave me high and dry.
So what's the work around? I know there's a way to mirror around a mate connector placed at the origin but I can't seem to control that in any repeatable fashion.
is there some logical reason why the good folks at Onshape don't simply plop the three primary planes at the start of an assembly model tree? It just feels like it would make life a lot easier!
What am I missing!!??
Comments
It's a bit of an Onshape quirk, basically the origin is "local" (i.e. doesn't "exist" in a higher level assembly and part origins don't exist in assemblies.
You basically got the answer already: mate connectors. You can literally hover over the origin, hold shift and orient the Z axis of a mate connector in any of the primary axes. If you are going to do this a lot it can be worth creating explicit mate connectors to make them easier to pick.
You mainly just need to get familiar with how mate connectors operate and how to quickly adjust them on the fly.
There are also other ways to manage it "upstream", some examples:
Here is a sample covering Eric's description. I was a little slow to make post. You can insert a surface to substitute for planes should you still not understand.
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/9a16e90e97ff0f49350854fe/w/8b1147e1bb96ce49e97d63d0/e/c9c5706e353183e5f69581ba
I'll keep trying to work with mate connectors… i have to say this one is frustrating. There's probably some technical reason why they don't just add planes to the root of an assembly - the origin is already there so it feels like this would be a pretty simple addition and would solve a lot of clunky work arounds. Like many of you I'm coming from Solidworks so that's my paradigm - I guess I simply need to unlearn this one. Ah well.
I favor @eric_pesty's first suggestion: explicit MC's owned by a part. They travel with the part wherever it goes, and can only be deleted within the PS where they were created. You are probably thinking about the symmetry of the eventual assembly when you're creating the part, so it's easy to add the MC's from the outset, and nearly as easy to return to the PS to add or adjust as needed .
I agree that the centre of the table top (implicit or explicitly added in the table part studio) is the cleanest mirror plane, because if the table top would move, the mirror would remain correct.
Otherwise, if it's just for sections, you could insert my public "Origin Mate connectors or Cube" at the top of your tree and mate/fix it to the origin.
the subassembly is configurable: you could choose to add the cube, or just the X/Y/Z mate connectors and you'll always have those to click.
I usually go the way Jelte described. You need to put one fixed part into your assembly first thing anyway. So why not mate it a mate connector and three planar surfaces?
I don't see why it would be bad to anchor the reference geometry to the origin. If it was owned by a part, it would move along with the part, as Edward pointed out, but that ain't necessarily a good thing. One would have to know in advance, which part will be the one, right? And then, every part may have it's own origin, that's only fair. If I want a reference in my assembly, I usually want it on the origin of the assembly, for all the parts or subassies to get positioned. And then we have assembly mirror: I can use it on a face of any part I like, but if I want to mirror the assembly as such, it's got to be the origin.
S, I usually use a kind of colour coded triad that looks like this and can be configured in currently three most common sizes:
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/96376d99360453c9de2818d5/w/bb399c6a9ca4dc119b98ab5b/e/597615ed102b15cf0e01db4d?configuration=List_zWIQeoGtq8ExSJ%3DTriadSize&renderMode=0&uiState=69314d8d66f3f1ac696dc8eb
It's well worth the effort to learn working with mates. I went through the same issue when transitioning from other CAD programs, but in a relatively short period of time I got used to OS methods and havent looked back. The mate connectors are quite flexible once you get used to them and require less input and less mates than previous CAD. You won't miss having default planes.
https://learn.onshape.com/courses/introduction-to-onshape-assemblies
https://cad.onshape.com/help/Content/mateconnector_a.htm?Highlight=mate%20connecter