Parent/Child feature relationships.

[jlotuaco]

Currently, I find it very difficult to keep track of and check how making changes to a sketch or feature affects other features further down the timeline, especially on complex models/assemblies with hundreds of sketches, bodies, and components.  

For example, if I have to go back to make a change to a feature created early in the design, I would like to be able to know what features down the line are related to the one I am about to change.  

By dumping all the sketches in one folder and with everything displayed with just icons in the timeline, it's impossible to see how sketches, features, and bodies are related to each other.  

It would be great if there was some way to better identify which sketches go with each feature.  Kind of in the same way that the Component Color identifies which items go with each component, but a little more specific.  

The current interface and layout becomes extremely inefficient with complex designs with hundreds of sketches and features.  

[roambotics_scott]

Essentially this would be a dependency graph https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/ideastation-request-a-feature-or/timeline-dependency-graph-drill-down... [marked solution provided but really more of a kludge / work-around than an actual solution]

[jlotuaco]

Yep, it is essentially a dependency graph. I've been using Solidworks for a while now so it's mainly a matter of getting used to a new workflow and it's the smaller details of a UI that are the hardest things to get used to. In Solidworks, if I mouse over a feature name in the browser, graphical arrows pop up pointing to all the previous features that it has some sort of dependency to.

For me a big reason to have a quick way to see dependency is for when I'm trying to figure out why I have an error. If I go back and change a dimension on a feature and all of a sudden a bunch of errors popped up in the timeline and combined bodies disappear, it's much harder to try to trace the culprit dependency that messed things up. Red icons and vague error descriptions don't really help. For instance, if the error is "reference no longer exists", it would be nice to know what that reference was originally. I already rename everything to help organize things, but I wish everything in the browser and timeline was more visually differentiated. Just having tiny color bars to represent components, tiny hash marks to identify the active/selected feature and a hidden selection button to activate make it hard to quickly differentiate everything and mentally visualize the structure of the entire design.

Some ideas-

-The names of active components and features are in bold

-Make the entire background of the component name in the browser the component color, not just a tiny bar on the side.

-Indent sub components names in the browser.

-Give the option for a multi-track timeline where each component features and sketches can be placed on a different track. Just like a timeline in a video editing program such as Adobe Premiere or Avid. It's still linear, but adds another level of organization.

[promm]

Thank you for your idea, this is being changed to archived.  Due to the number of votes and the time frame in which we would do this idea being over two years out, the new status is archived.  We do like the idea and it is something the we look to explore at a later time.

Regards,

Mike Prom