Drawing question in conjunction with Configurations

[TrippyLighting]

The design in the screenshot has over 600 components.

It is a design with two Configurations named 442 and 335.

Amongst those components are the bent aluminum tubes highlighted in blue. 

Their dimensions change when I change the configuration of the overall design, but they don't have their own configurations.

How do I get the two configurations of these tubes onto a drawing, preferably onto the same drawing sheet ?

I observe when I select the tube components in the front and create a drawing, it appears on the sheets as in the model, or in other words, the drawing sheet references the overall origin on the design, and not the origin of the component.

How do I fix that ?

Unfortunately I cannot share that design!

If needed I can crate a mockup with a similar problem.
 

[JamesMannFusion]

Hi Peter,

Drawings doesn't support having multiple configurations in the same document at once yet- there are plans to support this in future.

To do this you would have to save each configuration as a separate Design and insert both of them into one Design as an assembly and create a drawing from there. You could move the origin point inside this assembly to the origin of the tubes if you'd like.

Another way to create the drawing would be to save the tube components separately instead by clicking "Save Copy As" when right clicking on the tube components in the browser. Then insert those into an assembly and create a drawing- moving the origin point may be easier to do this way without the 600 components complicating things.

I hope that helps!

James

[TrippyLighting]

@JamesMannFusion thanks for the feedback. 

The problem with these tubes is that they are NOT configured components. They re "embedded" in the assembly design. The assembly has configurations that modify parameter values.

These tube designs use those parameters, so when I change the configurations, the parameters change and so do the tube designs.

I think what that leads to is that I have to create those tubes as external designs with their configurations, and use them as XREFs just as many of the other components. I've been trying to avoid that!

The parameters that drive the tube dimensions are part of that assembly design. Updating those dimensions, changes the tube designs, but also changes a number of other things in the assembly design. The update is limited to the assembly design and happens very quickly. However, to drive the fully modular and parametric nature of this design I also need to rely on an external master parameter list that that drives other things in the design and changes many of the individual external components in that design. 

Now It seem that I have to move the parameters from the assembly design into that master parameter list. Unfortunately, due to lack of granularity control, any change to any parameter in the master parameter list will require an update to any component that uses any parameter in that list, even if the actual change doesn't even effect that component. 

What a mess!

Also, "save as" obviously breaks the parametric nature of the design, so that isn't a solution, unless I delete the original and proceed as described above.

As can be seen in the screenshot I provided, one of the configured external designs is missing. The thing to note here is that this XREF is only missing on my Windows desktop at home. It is NOT missing when I open the design on my work notebook, or on my MacBook pro. This is another reason I am trying to avoid complex changes to this configured design. This happened while updating the design after changing  one of the parameters in the Master Parameter List, hence my reluctance to put more parameters into that list!
@karina.harper 

I have the strong feeling to get my work done I will have to resort to yet another hack 😞 

[karina.harper]

Hey @TrippyLighting 

Edit: Maybe I misread the convo. It does look like @JamesMannFusion answered your original question. Sorry!

So.. just to restate the issue: the problem with the Drawing is that the components are spaced too far apart to be properly visible, maybe only with certain Configurations?  Or - when selecting just these components they are not centered when you place them on the design (positioned way off and oriented incorrectly because they are rotated about the global origin rather than the local)?

I observe when I select the tube components in the front and create a drawing, it appears on the sheets as in the model, or in other words, the drawing sheet references the overall origin on the design, and not the origin of the component.

 Taking Configurations out of the equation, is the issue still here? How would you fix this with a standard design? It seems to me that this would still be a problem with or without Configurations. Is this exacerbated by the change in size, making switching Configs in the Drawing more annoying? 

Regarding the unresolved component issue, I had an idea on that but we'll discuss that on the insider thread once we get your access to that fixed.

Cheers,

Karina

[TrippyLighting]

I think I've found my workflow!

I could create a custom Named View by selecting the XZ plane of the tube component, use the Look At function and then save that as a new Named View.

I can then select that Named View for the Orientation when creating the drawing. 

For this design this will serve the purpose. It would be nice if we would not have to create a new Named View but just select the aforementioned origin plane for orientation.

The above is not related to the configurations update problems I described above ad which @karina.harper is aware of.

@JamesMannFusion It would definitely help if I could at some not too distant time in the future put more than 1 configuration on a sheet.