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Hi,
After using the tool for a few weeks now, and getting through with a somewhat larger design, I have made a few observations that I would like to discuss with someone more experienced then me. This will be a long one, but I hope at least some of you will stay with me. Maybe there are simple solutions to my problems, but if not, they may be worth a discussion. I'm not looking for point by point answers here, but a few viewpoints, long or short would be nice.
There is no doubt that F360 is a powerful tool. It is promoted not only as a design tool, but also a tool for doing top-down design in teams with build in (or soon to be) support for version control (partial now), data sharing through A360 (should be there, but I still haven't got it to work), and I'm sure there is or planned to be some sort of review functionality, annotation of drawings and models and other management goodies.
What I don't see, and this may be good or bad depending on who you ask, is a build in work flow. When you work on models and assemblies, the tool don't guide you through a specific way of organizing your work. This is good if you or your team manager if you're part of a team, is well organized, and the flow is defined and followed. It needs both a plan and discipline, but you get the choice of how you want it. The bad thing is that it needs both a plan and discipline.
So, let's get a bit more specific. I started a design, which in the end would involve around 40-50 objects + hardware. There would be 3 moving joints.
Needless to say, I started out without a plan. Or at least not a plan for how I would organize my design. Everything went well until I was about 80% complete and I discovered a minor skew in the symmetry of a component. Some bolt holes that were shifted a few fractions of a mm. This puzzled me since I was sure I had placed them exactly where I wanted them. Well, no problem I thought, I'll just go back in time, fix some sketches, and everything is good...... wrong.
It turned out that since I had no good plan. the relevant sketches was all over the place. They usually was in some component up the hieararchy, and since I had moved around the components after drawing them to align them with the bolt holes, the sketch did not necessarily match with the part. Once I started to look, there were small skews all over the place. I have no idea how they got there, but I tried to walk back through the time line to figure out where it all started, which I actually managed to do. The plan was to fix the features in turn, but now the time line failed me. When I started to fix features, I broke down stream features all over my design. Since the driving sketches was partly shared accross several components, and things had been moved around and modified afterwards, everything fell apart. Then went to the end of the time line and tried to delete the offending features in order to create them again. This also failed since a delete operation apparently goes back in time to delete the feature when it was created. If something depends on the feature, it's getting difficult.
Long story short, there was a tangle of dependencies criscrossing my design the prevented me from doing anything to fix this.
Right now, I can see to options:
1. Revert to DM mode to ditch the timeline, and then delete and recreate the features.
2. Start with a new file, and just do the drawing again, this time with a plan. Shouldn't take too long since I know how everythinkg should look, but very boring.
Before I found my current job, which involves a weird mix of mechanical and electronics design, I used to be a chip designer, making integrated circuits in a teams as large a 30 designers. These designs were usually performed in a manner we called "top-down, bottom-up" which meant we did the specification from the top, detailing out as we went down through the hierarchy. Then,when we had all the specifications ready, we started to design the components from the bottom up.
In my design, and in the training videos I have watched, the flow is more like you start to design from the top down doing specification at the same time. This could work, but given the state F360 is in at the moment, you need a fairly good idea of where you want to end before you do this. Why is that. Well, a couple of examples just of the top of my head.
- Well, there are limitations to when and where you can move a sketch in the hieararchy. If a sketch is created in one component to create another, you cannot necessarily bring it into the new one.
- Even though there is supposes to be a context menu choice for breaking dependencies, I rarely find that I am in that context.
- If you join stuff, then work on, and then you need to break a joint in order to move something a little bit, there is a good chance that many parts will fly apart, reverting to some old position.
- It is also difficult to know what is depending on what. There is nothing that presents the links between a feature, and the entity that drives that feature in a good way. At least not when things are getting complicated.
All in all, once your timeline starts to get long, you got more and more limits to how much you can clean up your design. I would like to isolate each component as much as possible, and keep the interfaces as clean as possible, but if you mess with a couple of sketches early on, you will stay in that mess.
What I think I'm going to do is to regard this first messed up model as my top-down specification, and just look to it while doing my bottom-up design. That way I can keep the separation between my components, and only maintain a smaller amount of inter-component dependencies. The important thing is to prevent things from exploding if you fix one little thing inside a component.
Back in my chip designing days, we spend a considerable effort inventing our work flow. Quite a lot of work was put into how changes on sub component should be done to avoid breaking the rest of the design. Clean and simple interfaces was imperative. Same in software design. I know all of this is not directly applicable, but much is.
I don't know if the Autodesk tema had any particular work flow in mind when they made this tool, but I'm guessing they went for flexibility to create your own flow. I also guess that a large majority don't have a particular flow. Many because they don't need it (simple designs with few parts and only one designer), while a few will get themselves in a mess. Others, especially professional teams, will maybe fail the first time, but they will invent a flow.
Maybe what F360 needs is some sort of best practice manual. Or at least a suggested work flow for those who don't have the resources to invent their own.
Ok, I think I will stop here. Hope this makes sense to someone out there.
Sorry for typos and bad English, it's getting late here.
Take care,
Kjell
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