Can the current position of an assembly be re-centered?

[John_C_Hansen]

I had moved  the left leg assembly  and failed to capture the position during the move now the center of rotation is outside the assembly. Is there any way to re-center the position in line with the current position of the actual assembly.  For reference,  In the file that is uploaded here,the left leg is the one that has  this issue whereas the center leg  is still located correctly.

[jeff_strater · Accepted solution]

@John_C_Hansen - what happened to the rigid groups in your design?  Those (or some kind of joint, depending on desired movement) are critical to building assemblies of components.  In the video below, I show the same process as in your other thread: how-to-move-the-origin-of-a-rigid-group/m-p/13007965#M325283 .  Note that the first attempt only moves the "foot" of the leg assembly, because the rest of the components are not related by joints of any kind.  Then, I create a rigid group within that component, and show that moving one component will move all of them.  Now, you may not want this to be really rigid.  It looks like this leg will move up and down.  That's fine, then you would use a Slider joint to control the sliding movement.  But, the effect will be the same:  As long as all of your components are related with joints, they will move together as a jointed unit.

[John_C_Hansen]

Thank you @jeff_strater  I was not yet to the point of making the slider joint and was just doing a bit of 'housecleaning' in preparation for positioning and attaching the legs to the top. But, when I lost the center of movement/rotation it just seemed to be related to a move/copy of the entire assembly and I thought the solution would be different than the last time which occurred during the 'design' phase.

I will view the videos, and once fixed I may not get into the same situation next time.

Yes, my plan is for a slide joint with a limited range of motion of no more than 4 inches. I have done joints in the past and should be able to easily do them for this project. I will make rigid joints between the three top parts of the legs to the desk top and the bottom parts of the three legs I plan to "ground" so they stay on the imaginary floor.

[Drewpan]

Hi,

As you have just found out, there are perils to moving things around instead of using joints and turning visibility

on and off. You will also run into performance issues if you do this a lot in a design because every time you move

something it will force fusion to recalculate. That is fine if you do it once or twice but if you move say five parts in a

row in the timeline then fusion recalculates EACH ONE in turn EVERY TIME. Performance of complex designs can

slow down to a crawl. Using joints causes fusion to only calculate what it needs at that time, not the whole design.

The usual workflow that the forum recommends is this. Either design your parts at the Origin and then use a joint

to connect it to the assembly as you design; or design the part in place and use an As Built joint to join it up. This

will stop you using the move function most of the time. The most common reason people move things in a design

with problems in the forum seems to be because they cannot see what they are doing because a part is in the way.

The Browser Tree has little Eye icons on it to turn the visibility of everything on or off. It is perfectly reasonable and

possible to do this mid operation so you can see. I often will do something like a combine cut where I turn things off

to select the correct piece as a cutting tool and then turn visibility back on.

You will find that if you avoid the Move command and use joints and the visibility on components that your workflow

will become much easier and performance will remain quite good.

Cheers

Andrew

[jeff_strater · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the reply, @John_C_Hansen.  I think it is probably worth stepping back a bit and coming to a deeper understanding of components, sub-assemblies, and joints in Fusion.  I think the key point here is:  Joints serve 2 purposes:  1) positioning components relative to other components, and 2) defining motion of one component relative to another component (even if that relative motion is rigid - no motion).

In a way, I think I may have encouraged a less than optimal workflow, by answering your question literally.  You asked, in this post, and the other, how to re-position components relative to the root component (sub-assembly) origin.  And, my answer showed how to do that.  Instead, I think it might have been better to step back and ask why you were interested in this type of positioning.  Personally, I never even notice or care what the origin of a sub-assembly component even is, because it almost never matters.  In my opinion, the only thing that matters is the position of the geometry in the components, relative to other components.  Further, many experts on this forum do not approve of moving components or bodies at all.  There are legitimate reasons for using those types of moves, but they are relatively rare.  Instead, you should use joints to position and constrain the motion of components.

So, in your case, as you built up the components of the "leg" sub-assembly, I would recommend using joints, either Rigid Group or As-Built Joint, if the components are already in relative position, or just Joint if they need to be positioned as well as motion-constrained.  Then, you would end up with a fully functioning leg sub-assembly, that you can then position relative to the desktop and "floor" using other joints, and never have to move components to do so.

Hopefully, this makes sense.  Feel free to ask more questions.

Jeff

[John_C_Hansen]

Thanks @jeff_strater & @Drewpan, I did not realize that the history of the moves was persistent. I will add the "Joints" into my workflow to place things where they belong and I am sure that much of what I have experienced will not return. The timeline will be much easier to manage without all those moves.

And while I understand how to control the visibility, I had not used it as effectively as I could have. I was using the move simply to overcome issues of clearing away all the visual clutter.

[Drewpan]

Hi,

I would strongly recommend that you do the embedded tutorials in the Fusion Documentation and also some of the

Self-Paced Learning to help you to learn fusion faster and better. They can be found here:

It is also much easier for the forum to help you if you attach your file AND a screenshot of what you want to achieve

and what the problem is. You can create a file to export like this:

Time spent on the tutorials and self paced learning will not be wasted. Also check out the three RULES that are pinned to the forum for further guidance.

Cheers

Andrew