Designing Instruments with Fusion, Joints? Planes? Points? Parametric?
Subassemblies most definitely CAN be grounded.
You just have to manage your origins properly!
There is nothing inherently wrong with designing each component in its own file. One of the advantages is that each component is completely self-contained without references to other objects in a design.
However, for small assemblies such as this, it is definitely not faster!
One of Fusion 360's strengths is top-down design, and the ability to design all components in a single file makes concept creation very fast and efficient.
For example in the case you described, the length and angles between the light paths are easy to capture in a skeleton (top-level) sketch.
Then you can start a new (empty) component and join it right away to one of the designated points in the light path sketch. Then you can start designing the geometry of that component. If the light paths need to change, you only need to modify the dimensions in that top-level sketch.
This is just one way of designing this with all components in a single file.
In my private projects I’ve designed assemblies with 400+ components all in one file. While I now work on a 2017 MacBook Pro, one of those assemblies was created on a now 11 year olds 27” iMac. Works without any lag!
‘In my professional work I often create simplified concept models with 100-200 components all in one file.
I often harvest designs from our projects that are all created in SolidWorks. 4000 components is a small machine.
A recent Medium projects had 17000+ components.
What constitutes large in your world?
I, fortunately, don't have to think about this too much and as such, I have not had to explore the possibilities.
I use my own license of Fusion 360 for my private projects and my professional work.
For professional work, I simply created a project for my company and folders for all the customers. The concepts I develop are shared with customers only in the form of a viewable link.
I mentioned in an earlier post that assemblies can be grounded, but did not explain how. Here's a screen recording that hopefully explains it.
With the introduction of Fusion Team some of what I write here might be out of date.
You can link or derive between designs in folder in a project. However, you cannot link or derive components between projects. I believe this is still the case. @jeff_strater please correct me if I am wrong here.
You can, however, copy designs between projects.
You can share a project with other people, but you cannot limit the view to certain folders. The view is limited to a project.
If I hade 500 different components in one design I would probably organize some of them in sub-folders, but not likely more than one level of sub folders. The file management abilities of the data panel are very rudimentary.
For example if you would create too deep of a sub folder structure, you can derive or link "stuff" into other designs (within a project) , but if you forgot what folder you placed those designs in, they can be hard to find. You can open the sources of the derived/linked designs but will find that there is no functionality provided to locate the folder the source file resides in.
@joe.lacour wrote:
What is your environment background? It looks like Grey Room but lighter. It might be compression for the video making it lighter looking. Looks nice!
That is indeed the Grey Room, which I use quite a bit.
@TrippyLighting wrote:
With the introduction of Fusion Team some of what I write here might be out of date.
You can link or derive between designs in folder in a project. However, you cannot link or derive components between projects. I believe this is still the case. @jeff_strater please correct me if I am wrong here.
I believe that you can link or derive between designs in different projects, as long as you are on a "Team Hub" (as opposed to a "private storage" hub. I believe that is available for anyone using Team Hubs. I know I can do it from my account, but sometimes we get access to things early...
Jeff Strater
Engineering Director
