Advice on Assemblies

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

I am about to start out on a project that will involve creating/using alot of assemblies in designing a product. I am coming from a solidworks learning when it comes to using assemblies/mates etc. I would like to get some feedback from people who have used assemblies and joints in fusion 360 and their apporach or workflow when using them.

The first main difference I see is that there is no assembly file type as such, everything can be made in one file. You can create all your components in one file and edit them directly from here. Is this the main way people go about creating assemblies? Does creating all your parts in one file mean creating a clean workspace just to work on one component becomes a nightmare?

Another workflow could be to create all your parts seperatley like you would do in solidworks and then import them all into fusion design to assemble them all. I tried this but when I made changes to one file, it wouldnt update the part in the other file I had imported it. Is there a way to do this? Would there be an easy way to manage you files in the hub if you did it this way? Say have a group for ceratin files that pertain to certain assemblies? Or maybe this workflow will not work for the way fusion is designed.

Joints seems to be the best way to control the relationships between components. There is also Align component options aswell. Is there situations where you should use align component rather than joints or vice versa?

I guess the crux of my post is to understand how people manage assemblies and how should we go about best using the joints tool with components. Do you make all your components in one file and just operate out of that, or do you slpit them out into different files and then import them into a sperate file. Is this a pain for file management or not?

Looking foward to the feedback 

Cheers

Simon

[CGPM]

I am a novice user but here is some info until someone better speaks up.  I was told about 2 months ago that assemblies will be addressed in the future.  As for now I think you just have to put everything in one file.

[Oceanconcepts]

At this point the parametric functionality in Fusion is promising, but incompletely realized.  I think you have to like the program for all the other things it lets you do more freely. It isn't structured to have links between separate files that cause them to update, at least now. I'm not a SW user, but I expect the workflow will need to be different, and dependent on what you are trying to accomplish. 

I use a lot of standard components, but import them into each file as I work. Or if I draw something, like a connector, that I will want again, I save it as an individual file (Save a Copy). But typically for me, these parts don't change, so the lack of linkage and updating is moot. If you need parts to maintain a parametric relationship, then my understanding is that they need to be in the same file. 

But is is easy to group components within a drawing, nest them into subassemblies, and to show and hide them at will. You can have a clean workspace at any time- apart from the browser list being challenging to manage. You can also use the "Activate" function to work on one component or subcomponent and ghost out others, while still being able to reference your design to them. 

I sometimes have several versions of a component in a drawing, work on them simultaneously, and show/ hide to compare solutions. The only downside is that the browser interface can get very long. 

For positioning components, it's difficult for me to give any guidelines- I use align a lot, but that's because I'm repositioning things frequently in the kind of work I do. I expect if you were designing mechanical assemblies where components had specific relationships that will remain fixed relative to one another, joints would be the way to go. 

Don't know if this helps at all, and I'm not sure if Fusion at this point would be the right tool for really complex assemblies. But it allows a very free and flexible approach to design that I find very appealing.