Feedback Request : Re-link lost projections

[anandjoshi]

Hello Fusion Sketchers,

We know that at times, it can be pretty daunting to find and repair yellow sketch geometry, which has turned yellow due to lost references. Sometimes you have to spend time to search missing projections or just start over again to solve the nagging yellow sketch related issues.    

We have listened to your feedback and are working on a brand-new way to quickly find and fix yellow sketch geometry.

Please have a look at the UI mock-up we are working on to cater these issues.

You will be able to access this Lost Projections UI, either by right clicking on a yellow geometry in a viewport or right clicking on a sketch icon which has turned yellow in your timeline.

Here is a quick example of a typical workflow –

Step 1 – Access Show Lost Projections from right clicking on yellow sketch from timeline

Step 2 – UI with lost projections is shown. Click on any entity from the UI, which gets selected in the 3D workspace with lost projection highlighted.

Step 3 – Now click on any valid geometry in 3D workspace to reassociate with already selected entity from the UI.

Step 4 – Reassociation successfully done. Icon next to the lost projected entity in the UI, turns green indicating successful reassociation. Done !

Feedback Requested

Now that you have seen what we have in mind to solve this problem, we’d love to ask a few questions:

1. Once you have either Re-linked, Broken-link or Deleted an item in the table, would you expect that item to stay in the table with a new icon, or would you prefer for it to disappear from the table completely so that the table is empty when you’re done?
2. Do you have any models with yellow sketch geometry in them that you wouldn’t mind sending to the team for testing?
3. Is there anything in particular about the workflow you think could be streamlined?

As always, we’d love to hear any suggestions or thoughts on what we shared above!

Anand

User Experience Designer | Fusion360

[maker9876]

Looks pretty amazing. Well done!

1) see no harm in removing items from the list once they've been dealt with. However would have to see what happens when you click on 3d body by mistake - perhaps it would be confusing if it immediately disappeared from the list? Blink and you might not realise you'd clicked on anything at all (if the list was long).

- Wondering if the workflow properly distinguishes between when an entire body was clicked on (to establish the original projection) and when select segments of a sketch were clicked on?

- See the "delete all" option but not clear how single lines can be deleted... presumably by selecting and hitting the delete key?

[hoegge]

Great - looking forward to that. A thing, that would be very useful too, mentioned before (in another thread I think), would be the ability tot show/hide projected items and non-projected items in drawings independently and also have projected items in the selection filter list, so you can easily find / delete etc. projected vs. non-projected items in drawings. They very often lay on top of each other and the long-click select method does not tell what is what.

[HughesTooling]

Here's a sample file that can be a pain to fix. I've projected the hole edges from the first body then used as references for holes in the second. Next I rolled the timeline back and cut the edges off so the reference is lost. If you just delete and reproject there's no way to fix the hole feature because if you delete all the points the hole feature defaults back to single hole mode not from sketch.

This is a very simplified example and can be fixed, it's just a easy way to force the error as an example.

Mark

[lucasproko]

Hey guys - thanks for the quick feedback. Here's our thoughts on the questions you've raised thus far:

@maker9876 wrote:

Looks pretty amazing. Well done!

1) see no harm in removing items from the list once they've been dealt with. However would have to see what happens when you click on 3d body by mistake - perhaps it would be confusing if it immediately disappeared from the list? Blink and you might not realise you'd clicked on anything at all (if the list was long).

- Wondering if the workflow properly distinguishes between when an entire body was clicked on (to establish the original projection) and when select segments of a sketch were clicked on?

- See the "delete all" option but not clear how single lines can be deleted... presumably by selecting and hitting the delete key?

To answer the three comments underlined above:

• If a user ever accidentally re-linked to something they didn't mean to, the Undo tool would still be available to them whether we keep the items in the UI or not
• Yes, each row in the table will be titled based on how the projection was initially created. If it was a body projection, then you will only be able to Re-link it to another body projection, and the same goes for individual edges.
• Single rows in the table will be deleted by highlighting the desired row hitting the Delete button in the UI

---

@hoegge wrote:

Great - looking forward to that. A thing, that would be very useful too, mentioned before (in another thread I think), would be the ability tot show/hide projected items and non-projected items in drawings independently and also have projected items in the selection filter list, so you can easily find / delete etc. projected vs. non-projected items in drawings. They very often lay on top of each other and the long-click select method does not tell what is what.

---

This tool will act like a way to quickly find the yellow geometry in a sketch, but it will not provide a filter to only show projected geometry vs. user-drawn geometry. We've recently completed some work so that you'll have less overlapping projections in your sketches, but I'm curious how else you would utilize a filter like this. Would it only be to delete overlapping entities? To find yellow geometry? I don't want to hijack this forum thread for this particular topic, so feel free to DM me with additional details if you'd like.

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@HughesTooling wrote:

Here's a sample file that can be a pain to fix. I've projected the hole edges from the first body then used as references for holes in the second. Next I rolled the timeline back and cut the edges off so the reference is lost. If you just delete and reproject there's no way to fix the hole feature because if you delete all the points the hole feature defaults back to single hole mode not from sketch.

This is a very simplified example and can be fixed, it's just a easy way to force the error as an example.

Mark

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Thanks for the example, @HughesTooling. This is definitely a case that will be solved by the new functionality!

Thank you everyone. Looking forward to hearing more feedback soon.

[HughesTooling]

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@lucasproko wrote:

Hey guys - thanks for the quick feedback. Here's our thoughts on the questions you've raised thus far: 

To answer the three comments underlined above:

• If a user ever accidentally re-linked to something they didn't mean to, the Undo tool would still be available to them whether we keep the items in the UI or not

Is Undo going to close the dialog like undo does at the moment while projecting? The way project works at the moment is a bit frustrating and wastes time, seem to remember @jeff_strater had a thread asking about improvements to the project workflow. Would be nice to have access to undo without closing the Lost Projection dialog or leave all fixed items in the dialog and allow changing the selection.

Unfortunately Fusion suffers from undo canceling commands in quite a few places so instead of one click and carry on it's 3 clicks, one cancels the command, one undoes then restart the command.

Mark

[anandjoshi]

@HughesTooling Undo will revert to last state without closing the dialog.

Cancel will revert all actions taken in the active command without closing the dialog.

Regards,

Anand

[ittay.dror]

Looks good. Projected points will also be supported, right? 

What if I just want to re associate a projection because I figured it is linked with the wrong curve?  (that happens when I trace something on a sketch and there are several points or curves that are behind each other from the sketch plane)

[hoegge]

Really looking forward to this feature going live. With regards to your questions:

Question 1)

• I would like them to stay, since some might be done wrongly (by me) so I have to redo them instead of cancelling and starting over. That could be the case in complex cases, where a lot of references are overlapping. But it would be much more useful if you could toggles between showing or hiding solved items with a check box. 

Question 3)

It would be really useful if there was three other check boxes to toggle visibility of

• a) lost (yellow) projection items,
• b) intact (purple or green) projection items,
• c) other "normal" (non-projected) items.

That would really help in complex situations. These three boxes would then also solve the need of point 1). The three boxes would also be very useful in the sketch environment in general (both for toggling display and selection)

Thanks

[maker9876]

Would it be worth adding to the list "! Unconstrained dimensions" as a fast and easy way to locate all the Blue Lines in a file?

Clicking on the alert will highlight the blue lines (which can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from black)>

Only when ALL the lines in a project have been properly dimensioned or fixed will this alert disappear.

[lucasproko]

Hey all - thanks for the continued comments. Here's a few answers to your inquiries:

@ittay.dror wrote:

Looks good. Projected points will also be supported, right? 

What if I just want to re associate a projection because I figured it is linked with the wrong curve?  (that happens when I trace something on a sketch and there are several points or curves that are behind each other from the sketch plane)

---

@ittay.dror - Yes, projected points will also be supported. At this time we will not be offering the ability to re-link projections that still have a healthy link. For those cases, your best bet will be to either undo the projection and re-project, or if it's something you did in the past, you'll have to break link with the previous projection, re-project the desired curve, and then re-implement the appropriate constraints. This is an area we can explore for future iterations, but in the meantime it would add scope to the project without adding as much value as re-linking yellow geometry in our eyes. If you have more details on the specific workflows this functionality would unlock, please either comment here or send me a private message.

---

@hoegge wrote:

Really looking forward to this feature going live. With regards to your questions:

Question 1)

• I would like them to stay, since some might be done wrongly (by me) so I have to redo them instead of cancelling and starting over. That could be the case in complex cases, where a lot of references are overlapping. But it would be much more useful if you could toggles between showing or hiding solved items with a check box. 

Question 3)

It would be really useful if there was three other check boxes to toggle visibility of

• a) lost (yellow) projection items,
• b) intact (purple or green) projection items,
• c) other "normal" (non-projected) items.

That would really help in complex situations. These three boxes would then also solve the need of point 1). The three boxes would also be very useful in the sketch environment in general (both for toggling display and selection)

Thanks

---

Thank you for your suggestions, @hoegge. We will discuss whether we can keep the rows in the table but give a checkbox to hide them. Regarding the three check boxes to filter certain types of geometry, as I mentioned in my previous reply to your post, I would love to know more about the workflows where you would utilize these filters. Feel free to follow up here, or in a direct message.

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@maker9876 wrote:

Would it be worth adding to the list "! Unconstrained dimensions" as a fast and easy way to locate all the Blue Lines in a file?

Clicking on the alert will highlight the blue lines (which can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from black)>

Only when ALL the lines in a project have been properly dimensioned or fixed will this alert disappear.

---

@maker9876 - Considering we already have the color differentiation, I'm not sure how often this would get utilized. That being said, we do understand that sometimes it is difficult to differentiate between blue and black, and other times it's difficult to differentiate dimensions from sketch lines. We've been playing around with increasing the thickness of our sketch entities which helps in both these cases. Also, I'm not sure if you've noticed the subtle change in the Sketch Browser icon when a sketch is fully constrained, but look at these two images and you'll note the little pin in the icon:

Thanks again for all the feedback!

[maker9876]

In a sense, blue lines are like yellow lines, they are boundary definitions that are not properly constrained / defined.

Just like yellow lines, blue lines can be hard to find, to identify and to select in a drawing. Especially when they lie on on top of the other. Indeed because of their dark colour they can be worse.

Have been told before that if a design is showing problems one of the first things to check is that all sketches are properly constrained. Looking for the little pin is quite hard work! Especially since it doesn't show up in the timeline which means that you have to "open" each of the components in turn and look into its subfolders. And then, a few hours later if you are still having problems, you might end up doing the whole thing all over again, just to make sure you didn't miss a sketch. No fun.

If we acknowledge that a blue line is just as much of a "bug" in a project file as a broken projection, then it would be entirely appropriate that, eyeballing the timeline for yellow sketch icons leads us to a list of both broken projections and unconstrained blue lines. Which we can then fix in a systematic way without missing anything. 

Alternatively, the pin icon detail could be made to appear in the timeline. But that wouldn't be quite as clear or as complete a solution.

[SolubleSpork]

The biggest point of feedback I have is in regard to question 1.  @hoegge already mentioned the idea of keeping the solved items but having a checkbox to show/hide them in the list.  Other CAD packages I have used can do this with interference detection if you ignore interferences (modeled threads that interfere with a hole or non-timed threads).  There is a simple checkbox that allows you to hide ignored interferences.  When it is unchecked, they show up, but they change icon/gray out.  When its checked, the list just dwindles as you fix take care of them.

The only concern I would have is, how long do you save those for?  One "session" of the re-linking dialog box being open?  What if you accidentally re-link incorrect and then close the dialog, now it would be gone.  Or do all of those re-linked references stick with the part in perpetuity?  What if you break the link again and re-link again?  Are there now two instances, etc.  I don't have the answers, but in some form or another, I would like to see the ability to keep the solved items and hide/show them as needed.

[hoegge]

Hi @lucasproko

I have often found myself in a situation, where I was revising an assembly and wanted to change references to other components. Suddenly, I don't want to reference another component in a current one. Then it can be difficult in a sketch, to see which parts are projections - valid ones, and which are broken, because geometries can be on top. So if I could toggle visibility to only see e.g. valid (purple) projections and hide everything else, then it is much easier to see what was used for reference and also sometimes it is nice to be able to show only the few broken references (yellow), so you can delete them easily. And the same with selection filtering - then I can select only broken or valid projections in a sketch without messing with the geometries drawn in the sketch. It is important, because you often don't want to touch the geometries in the sketch, that can be referenced by other items in other sketches or objects. So workflow:

1) I create one component 1.

2) Make another component 2 and project geometries from component 1 on a sketch and add geometries to construct bodies in component 2. 

3) I make component 3, that projects objects from component 2. 

4) Then I find out I need to totally change or redo component 1. To easily see what links to break or projections do delete - I'd like to filter display of items in the sketches in component 2, to see only projections and also lost projections, so I can easily delete them and start constraining items in the sketch in other ways. Often the projects are covered by items in the sketch. Sometimes I want to project other items from other sketches or bodies to the sketch and then use constraints to associate with them instead.

Did that explain the need / workflow? I have just so very often run into the desire to filter display and/or selection filter based on geometries being projections, lost projections or "normal" sketch entities. Also it would make it much easier to, e.g., select all projected items and choose Break link. Of course you can select all and still choose break link, but it is very difficult to see which one of the selected geometries are actually projection - and you might not want to break all. In the case below, you can see the lost references as yellow, but sometimes other geometries overlap. In the lower left corner there is a line on top of the projected line (which can be important to keep the line for other references if the original purple / yellow reference is lost - then it can destroy a lot of other components, since a lot of objects cannot survive loosing a geometry - especially sweep). So of course it is important to always only project as few items as possible (a few points), so you don't have geometries in your sketch that might disappear. If it is only a few points, they are even harder to see if you cannot turn off the normal geometries.

[scottmoyse]

It would be good to build this out with a view to extending it for future use with fixing up broken references in features and joints. 

[Anonymous]

The issue I'm having is fixing warnings or issues associated with projecting from a sketch onto a surface which is the opposite of your example. Will this UI work in that case too? Currently deleting and redoing the sketch of projections destroys everything downstream. 

It seems to me like the projections functions should be pulled out from under Sketch and made as unique functions that are then editable. If I want to choose a different curve, I have to delete the projection and redo. Seems weird that you can't select it and have the option to redefine it.

[ittay.dror]

While designing the flow for fixing lost projections, maybe handle other types of issues. For example, many times when my drawing is not fully constrained, it is hard to find what element (many times a point) is not constrained. Highlighting these in a list and a GUI would be nice. 

[SolubleSpork]

+1 for the idea on highlighting areas that are unconstrained.

[Ceecis]

Right clicking on yellow projections and selecting a "relink" item menu, which would then bring up an interface similar to the project interface would be nice.

Actually, couldn't this simply be done from the project/intersect UI? Since they are basically the same functionality, good UI design dictates that they should be together for sake of consistency and being able to use already learned behaviors.

[Ceecis]

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@maker9876 - [...] Also, I'm not sure if you've noticed the subtle change in the Sketch Browser icon when a sketch is fully constrained, but look at these two images and you'll note the little pin in the icon:

Thanks again for all the feedback!

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I hadn't noticed the difference in sketch icons for a fully constrained sketch versus one that isn't. The pin is sort of nondescript. Maybe a small green check mark would be more appropriate. It provides validation. The lack of it would make users wonder what is wrong with their sketch and more likely to notice the difference. Then you could add a label that shows up when hovering the sketch that gives status details like "Not fully constrained, missing references" etc.