Why are assemblies SO BAD!?

bodhe — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 14:14:08 GMT

Why are assemblies so difficult? I have 15 years and over 10,000 hours of CAD experience - why are fusion assemblies so difficult to work with? Please show me how I am wrong

What are assembly contexts? How do I get rid of them? A part should be a part no matter where I open it or how I use it.
Why are Joints so awful? Maybe a single point relationship works when you have finished parts with holes but what about when you are in the middle of designing something and only want 2 faces to be coincident? If you delete a joint it recalculates the whole tree and destroys the design. How do you select specific points for the joints? Do you have to make a sketch with a point for the origin every time you have a joint? How do you change the orientation of the joint origin? Often, you just can't get two components to line up in the correct orientation
Internal component, external component, linked part... What is going on?
Why do you need the assembly history active to edit parts in the assembly and be able to reference internal and external geometry? The Assembly tree recalculates when you make changes and blows everything up
How do you reference external geometry without linking it? In solid works there is a button you can toggle that allows for external references. When you turn it off, you can still select an external reference, it just isn't linked. I want to copy a hole pattern, but I don't want the link and the recalculation of both parts every time I make a change

Re: Why are assemblies SO BAD!?

TrippyLighting — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 16:16:07 GMT

I have over 30 years of professional CAD experience as an engineer. I started working with SolidWorks in 1998 and still work with it. I started working with Fusion in 2014. I work with other CAD applications, for example I own a license of ZW3D 2020. There are a number of other 3D modeling applications I work with, namely Blender and very occasionally SideFX Houdini.

First, depending on what feature set you are using in SolidWorks, Fusion might not the equivalent, but Autodesk Inventor could be a better choice. Fusion does not have weldments, a frame generator, mirroring parts has limited functionality etc.

Joints in Fusion are not awful, but they do require a bit of rethinking of the general workflow. There are situations where "normal" geometric mates would be handy, but those aren't available in Fusion (but in Inventor alongside Joints)

Assembly contexts allow associative referencing of geometry into external components.

External component and linked components are the same thing.

Those references/links can be broken.

I have disabled the default creation of Assembly Context in the Preferences. You can still create them when needed on a component by component basis.

Yes, you need the assembly history active to edit and reference parts. If recalculating the timeline (design history" blows everything up, there is likely a problem with the design workflow. If you can share a design (export as .f3d, or .f3z and attach to a post), I can look at it and point you in the right direction.

Referencing geometry from sketches or 3D geometry by default is associative, but you can break those links.

In general you post indicates to me that you did not go through one of the tutorial courses here:

I did not do that either when I started with Fusion (they did not exist at the time).However, I would recommend doing that. Fusion seems at first sight very similar in some aspects to SolidWorks, but there are some key differences that are very easy to miss.

Those missed concepts then create enough frustration to write a post like yours 😉

topic Re: Why are assemblies SO BAD!? in Fusion Design, Validate & Document Forum

Why are assemblies SO BAD!?

Re: Why are assemblies SO BAD!?