How to set up joints for lego like bricks.

[sertanV7D8A]

I have designed some bricks of my own. I want to stack them, when I put them on top of each other, I want them to snap together. 

To explain further, imagine you have components and you are dragging them around and you want to create something like a castle. You need components to snap right away so you can build away.  But it is so much work, I don't know how to do this. Can anyone help me?

Do I need a third party software?

[jeff_strater]

Hi @sertanV7D8A,

Welcome to Fusion!  Making lego-like models are a popular project to learn CAD.  I think most of us have done some version of this sometime!

What I've done to make assembly easier for these kinds of models is to use Joint Origins.  Joint Origins are building blocks of joints, and normally, you don't need to create them separately.  But, there is one cool thing you can do with them.  Drag a Joint Origin from one component onto another Joint Origin on another component will automatically create a new Joint between them.

So, I created my lego-like models with Joint Origins already in them.  Here is one example:

Then, when I insert instances of these components into a new top-level design, I can just drag them to snap together, by dragging on the Joint Origins.  I created a screencast, but it is taking a long time to be processed.  I'll post it as soon as it comes in.

This method is not 100% perfect, sometimes you have to adjust the joints a bit to get exactly the right orientation, but I think it's pretty useful.

Hope this gets you going.

Jeff Strater (Fusion development)

[sertanV7D8A]

Hi Jeff,

Thank you so much for the explanation. It is really helpful. I will start working with joint origins. I look forward to seeing the screencast to better understand the 'drag and snap' action you talked about.

best

[jeff_strater · Accepted solution]

Sorry for the delay.  Might have been my slow home network, but for some reason my screencast just came through this morning!

Anyway, here it is:

Jeff

[sertanV7D8A]

Many thanks Jeff!