bake symmetry into designs

[roambotics_scott]

I have a rectangular part that has identical features in all four corners (mirror symmetry down both perpendicular center planes).

Even if I generate those with two mirror operations*, half of the time the symmetry is randomly broken without warning so I'm forced to manually go through and repeat the same operations four times rather than just doing them once.

It'd be really great to just be able to say «respect this symmetry**» and have a part do that properly without having to do unnecessary mirroring and duplication of components / bodies, and to have a toggle to do things that explicitly break symmetries when necessary.

* there should be an option to do two mirror planes in a single step, but that's another issue

** this should also support periodic patterns, radial symmetry, and combinations of two or more operations

[TrippyLighting]

Some of this sounds like a bug. Perhaps make a screencast and post it in the regular forum.

Bug fixes usually have a higher priority, but while they're at it they may as well go ahead and add a couple of features 😉

[HughesTooling]

Is this a problem with 2d sketches or mirror from the create menu. If it's mirroring from the create menu mods to the parent modify the copy but mods to the copy don't modify the parent, that could be the probem.

Mark

[roambotics_scott]

It's really a few bugs and some things that don't exist at all.

I suspect that the underlying problem is that all of the current symmetries (in sketch, mirroring components, patterns, etc) are ad hoc and there is no systematic / unified «symmetry engine».

What F360 really needs is to rethink that stuff from the ground up and build something great.

Synchronous Design Intent / Live Rules in Solid Edge do symmetry, patterning (and alignment) so well and just work magically.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nPQOalmlrc

It’d solve a lot of these problems and generally be awesome to have that.

[keqingsong]

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