components move seemingly without reason

[philletourneau]

Hello,

Admittedly I'm pretty new to Fusion 360, however I've been catching on quickly. There is one behavior that is really throwing me off though.

I often find that through the course of my work on a multi-component design, with several nested components and sibling components, that I will randomly find components have moved X,Y,Z without intentionally moving them.

I suspect it MAY have to do with my haphazard use of "Capture Position" through the course of the design. From my understanding, checking the "Capture Position" box may impact actions I take editing previous features, and possibly downstream as well.

Is that the cause of my issue? It's SUPER frustrating to align components perfectly, and then hours later discover that one or two have moved either to a previous position or possibly to a "random position".

My design is almost entirely parametric, with a few sheet metal parts, but over half being sketch-derived extrusions and such.

Please help!

[TrippyLighting · Accepted solution]

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@philletourneau wrote:

I suspect it MAY have to do with my haphazard use of "Capture Position"

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I can guarantee that that is the problem!

Please share your model.

[HughesTooling · Accepted solution]

You should avoid capture positions if possible and use joints to position components. Note because of the timeline if you edit a feature before a joint or capture position the component will jump back to where it was before the joint was added. From helping on the forum 90% of the time people are misusing capture positions, not sure I've seen a single case where it was used correctly. If you're building assemblies you should probably read the Rule #1 thread and have you looked through the assembly section in the help?

Mark

[philletourneau]

@HughesTooling Thank you for taking the time to reply.

I have been quite good at adhering to RULE 1. I always create a component for every part before I start working on it.

What has happened, and I'm not sure if this is relevant or not, is that I will create a component, let's say say on v10 of my design for a new part, but by v25 I have 4 copy-pasted instances of it, at which point I created a new component and moved those 4 instances INTO that newly created component to group them together.

I've done this quite a few times in this project now. Is this a factor in my issues too? I truly am very conscientious about activating components to work on them.

I do also FREQUENTLY edit early features of components to iterate on my design, again, always activating that very specific component, often a child component of a parent component.

Thanks for the links, I will read up more on assemblies.

Finally... is there any hope for this file? Can I "save as" all my individual components and then create a new design without all the "capture position" baggage hanging over my head?

[TrippyLighting]

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@philletourneau wrote:

Finally... is there any hope for this file? 

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As stated already, pease share your model. Without the model everything is guess work.

[philletourneau]

Here's the file:

https://a360.co/2P5QjTJ

I want to know if I can extract the components, to save their individual history and features so that I can continue to iterate on them, but without the "capture location"s I did along the way...

I can start over the assembly and positioning everything, I just want to keep my parts as they are with editable history.

@TrippyLighting @HughesTooling 

[TrippyLighting]

Yo answer your question first, if you religiously adhered to R.U.L.E #1 then, yes. You can save-as your components out into their own files in the data panel.

However looking at your design the capture position "problem" isn;t the only problem. You move bodies within their components quite often and that also is often not advisable.

Then I would urge you to make sure that your component origins are in sensible places. If you import geometry no matter wether those are sketch geometry (DXF and SVG) or 3D geometry, if heir origins are not in sensible places, then move them there. Origins are important debugging markers and generally are important reference points.

I think you don't really ned to save all your components into their own files as that would take a while.

Roll your timeline back and delete all the capture position features and those move features that make sense and as you do that use the proper assembly joints to assemble your design.

[philletourneau]

Thank you so much for taking the time to look at my file!

Noted. I will try not to move things within my components anymore.

Admittedly Origins within Fusion360 have been confusing to me. I will definitely read up on them more. However the two courses I've followed so far have not gone into best practices.

Do you know of a good video or document explaining best practices for origins? Should I build every sketch and body around a 0,0,0 origin or something?

[TrippyLighting]

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@philletourneau wrote:

 Should I build every sketch and body around a 0,0,0 origin or something?

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Yes, for the most part. That does not mean everything has to be "centered" around the origin, but the origin has to be in a sensible place.

Consider symmetries in your design. When the Origin is in the center of these symmetries that will usually greatly help modeling operations such as mirroring and patterning.

Another consideration  is a reference pointing for assembling a component.

A little forethought in how to design your geometry around the origin can make things much easier and helps debugging a design.

[philletourneau]

Thank you. One thing I have been looking for but haven’t been able to find, is a way to set the position of an object to a set of coordinates?

E.g. can I say “move this component or body to coordinates X Y Z”? Because I’ve tried many other move dialogue options and they don’t seem to offer that way to position items.

[HughesTooling]

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@philletourneau wrote:
Thank you. One thing I have been looking for but haven’t been able to find, is a way to set the position of an object to a set of coordinates?

E.g. can I say “move this component or body to coordinates X Y Z”? Because I’ve tried many other move dialogue options and they don’t seem to offer that way to position items.

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Have you tried using a joint origin then a joint between the component and the joint origin?

Mark

[philletourneau]

@HughesTooling that icon looks a lot like the one I get when I'm creating joints and choosing the points or segments to joint and how they come together. It seems to be a part of that action of creating a joint. By moving the cursor around while creating the joint I see that little origin icon in different orientations under my cursor.

What I was asking lastly was how to move a component to a set of 3D coordinates. E.g.

1. Choose component

2. Enter "Move" tool

3. somehow say "Move selected component to these absolute coordinates X:0 Y:0 Z:0" or something like that.

All the move options I've seen so far are for relative movement, not absolute positioning to the Origin, or similar.

[HughesTooling]

Try this, turn on the document origin then start the joint origin command and select the document origin. Now set the joint origin to the coordinates you want. This is similar to what's available using a joint but you have more options to orientate the joint origin.

You can see here I've reorientated the Z and X axis and set a XYZ position. You probably want to always create these at the top level in the browser is you want the point in absolute document coordinates. Once created you can use a joint to position you component

Mark