Create new assembly from existing assemblies and components

[d_hg]

Hello -

I'm learning how to use F360, and I'm having trouble figuring out how to take an existing component or assembly and wrap it a new parent assembly. It is possible to create the assembly tree structure in advance, but I can't imagine ever knowing exactly the levels of nesting I'll need at the start of a design. A few times now I've had to delete a bunch of work and start over because the nesting wasn't right initially.

Please see the concrete example in the screencast. I've done a bunch of work adding sub-components to the "cap box" assembly before realizing that I actually want "bottom" to be nested in another layer - maybe "bottom with screws". So I rolled the history back to just after I inserted the bottom, create a new component and try to drag it in.

What's the best process when it's necessary to group or nest one or more components/assemblies into a new parent assembly?

thanks!

[Phil.E]

You cannot cut and paste while in a rolled back state. So all component reordering should happen at the end of the timeline.

To create a new sub assembly:

1. Roll to end of timeline

2. Create new component

3. Drag existing component into it.

Does that help?

[d_hg]

Thanks for the idea. Unfortunately for my current case, I see the same behavior when rolled to the end of the timeline - the new component does not seem to "accept" drag and drop of the old component.

(I do recall that in a previous case, it may have allowed me to do this. It ended up creating a dozen or so new history elements in the timeline that looked like deletes and re-creations, and gave me a warning about switching parents. It looked "wrong" so I undid it.)

[Phil.E]

There must be associations between the component you are trying to drag and something else.

Can you create two blank components and drag one into the other?

[d_hg]

Do associations include joints? Because I definitely have a lot of those.

That said, even new, blank components seem to exhibit the same behavior. See screencast.

thanks!

[Phil.E]

This is too hard to tell from the videos you are posting. If I have access to your design data I might figure out what's going on a lot faster. If you like, you can add phil dot eichmiller at autodesk dot com to the project and let me know which design it is. Your data will be kept confidentially and I will leave the project the moment I'm done.

Thanks,

[Phil.E · Accepted solution]

It is as I first suspected, the timeline is not rolled to the end.

This is what I found when I opened the file:

After moving the marker to the very end, drag and drop for components works.

Thanks,

[d_hg]

Okay, thanks.

In my second screencast, I did click "move to end" on the timeline before trying to nest the component.

Perhaps the issue was that I didn't have the most top-level component activated, so parts of the timeline were hidden?

[Phil.E]

That is precisely it. When the active component is showing only the timeline for itself, roll to end moves only to end of the active component (or visible) portion of the timeline.

Thanks,

[jlarsonLP454]

I discovered this issue yesterday, and I see that the "fix" is that all component reorganization has to happen at the end of the timeline. That works fine, but it's a terrible workflow. It means that I can't ever clean up a project timeline.

In my case, I wanted to add in some subassemblies ("components") to my structure because I need to change the orientation of about 30 parts and I'd rather not do it individually. My original structure wasn't thought out too well (not uncommon when doing R&D design work), my timeline is fairly messy, and the whole file has become difficult to work with. I expected I'd be able to go "back in time" using the timeline and clean up the file to add more subassemblies, reduce the number of positioning and rigid group commands, etc., but since restructuring can only happen at the end of the timeline, I can't do this. 

Since this assembly is going to continue to change several times through the R&D process I realized I can't continue with the current file, and I am now building an entirely new assembly file, and having to copy/paste new all the parts into a better thought out subassembly structure. This is time consuming and frustrating, especially since I expect I'll have to do this again on other designs. As the OP said, "I can't imagine ever knowing exactly the levels of nesting I'll need at the start of a design."

Please consider making the timeline an actual timeline, where you can truly go "back in time" and do anything at that point that you could do at the end of the timeline - I know it will break more stuff, but as long as I can work through those errors that's to be expected. Alternatively, it would be great if I could just redefine the owner of a particular component instead of needing a copy/paste timeline feature that gets put in at the end - in other words, let me roll back the timeline to the point of a component's creation, and let me drag it into a different part of the structure tree without creating a new timeline feature to show the move - have it act like I put it in the right folder when I created it. Sure this might break stuff downstream, but again, that can be dealt with.