Editing features without capturing design history

[carloquinonez]

I see that when you turn off the design history, it's still possible to edit some features, like Holes and Fillets. Is there any documentation on how features work when design history is turned off? I'm curious how these work because turning off design history makes working with complex models more managable and I'm wondering how to use this more effectively - especially as a developer...

[jeff_strater]

Yes, there is some limited support for edit while working in direct modeling (non-history) designs.  There is no rollback for edit, so you are limited to features that can easily be removed from the model and re-created.  Hole, Fillet, and Pattern (I think) are really the only features which are supported.  Even then, there are some downstream edits that can "dissolve" the feature so that it cannot be edited.  Internally, what Fusion does is to delete all the faces of the feature, then re-invokes the creation command with the parameters it has gotten from the feature.  So, if the faces of the feature can be deleted and the model healed, we can support an "edit" workflow.

The biggest limitation (at least to me) with direct modeling is that you cannot edit a sketch and have it affect the features built from that sketch.

That said, I have built a lot of pretty complex models using direct modeling (mostly before Fusion supported design history).  It takes a certain mindset to be successful.  You have to have things pretty well planned and the component approximately sized (it is hard sometimes to change geometry created by one of the early features, if you have added a lot features to that geometry later).  But, I generally like working in direct modeling, and I'm glad that we continue to support it.  And, as you say, for larger models, it can make editing more manageable.

Let us know how you get on with your use of Fusion!

Jeff Strater (Fusiond development)

[carloquinonez]

Thanks for the reply. At some point, I'd love to learn more about what "easily removed" means.

I think building more intelligent features that can be edited in direct modeling mode will be pretty important to a project I'm working on. It's too complex a model to effectively share with a big community, but the direct modeling version is lot quicker to modify.

How does direct editing vs. history affect the ability to merge/rebase designs? Would more intelligent features in direct modeling model change anything about merging/rebasing?

And sorry for all the questions, but I have a lot of time waiting for fusion to catch up.

[jeff_strater]

What I meant by "easily removed" is that the faces that were produced by the feature could be selected, and could be deleted using the Fusion "Delete" command.

For instance:  If you have a simple block with a hole:

Then, you can select the faces of this hole, and choose Delete.  You will end up with the block as if the hole had not been created:

however, if I add some features after the hole (in this case two fillets):

Then select the hole faces, highlighted above, and you cannot delete these faces, because the model cannot heal itself.  So, in the first case, we can delete the hole, then re-create it, while in the second, we cannot.  So, in direct modeling, the first hole would be editable, while after the modification of the fillets, it would not be.

Yes, it would be nice to support more of this kind of feature edit in direct modeling, but it gets harder and harder the more feature types we tried to include.  So, we stuck to the most commonly edited features.  In parametric modeling, this is easier, because you can always go back in time to when the feature was created.

Parametric vs. Direct really won't affect merging at all, at least initially, as far as I know.  Once we support merging in Fusion, we will probably not support merging at a feature level, so this won't have any effect, I believe.

Hope this clears up some of your questions.

Jeff