Moving features in timeline from main component to timeline in subcomponent?

[Anonymous]

I want to to move features from my main component timeline into a sub component timeline.

Or just, that it is linked and shows up in the sub component timeline for a better overview and easier changes.

Is this somehow possible or is there a workaround to realize it?

If this problem is already solved in another thread, please put the link in the comments.

Thank you in advance!

Best Greetings Noah

[mavigogun · Accepted solution]

For Components all originating in the same design document- not shared Components Linked from another design - there is only one Timeline.    Regardless of Component source, only one Timeline per document.   You can demonstrate this by Copying a Component that references Features/elements elsewhere in the design, and pasting into a new design- the new design's Timeline will contain warnings.   The colour of Timeline Features illustrate the relationship to the Browser contents.    The most we can do with managing the appearance of Features in the Timeline is dragging Features to new locations- with compelling consequences - or collapsing sections into Groups.    There are several Idea Station posts related to tagging/flagging Timeline Features.

[TrippyLighting]

You may want to share your particular case in form of a screencast and also maybe share your model, so we can use that as an example to explain things.

[chrisplyler]

You really should make sure that the Component you want to work on is the one you Activate prior to doing the work.

Try this: Roll back your timeline to right after the Feature you want to move. Delete it. Activate the CORRECT Component. Now recreate the Feature. And finally, roll the timeline back to the end. If any other Features were dependent on that one, they will get yellow warnings, and you will need to edit each one of them so that they get their references back.

[jonwienke]

That is a kludge. If you can move a sketch from one component to another, you should be able to move features based on that sketch (extrusions, etc) from one component to another as well. Being forced to delete a feature, recreate it under the new component, and then redo everything dependent on that feature is totally ridiculous.

[chrisplyler]

Yes, I won't argue that the ability to drag-n-drop Features would be great. Keep in mind that it COULD cause a lot of trouble if care and thoughtfulness wasn't used when doing so.

I humbly submit that if care and thoughtfulness was your strong point, you wouldn't have accidentally created Features in the wrong Component. Hey, I'm not trying to be condescending...I've made that same mistake plenty of times. All I'm saying is that HAVING the ability to move Features from one Component to another could have unintended consequences...and we are humans who make mistakes...and so it would be another potential mistake waiting to happen.

[jonwienke]

It's not so much accidentally creating a feature in the wrong component, as wanting the ability to edit the design and reorganize features and components to accommodate the design change without having to delete and recreate them. The current limitation is plain stupid.

Also, if you erroneously move a feature from one component to another, you could move it back, or undo the move, if you didn't like the result.

[Anonymous]

I know. One should change things one can change, one should accept things one can't change.

But, Fusion 360 is a tool. A tool somebody sane (hopefully and very likely) is in charge of to decide which features to implement and which features to leave out.

Moving construction steps from the (top) component to a give other component can't break future things, as long all the steps in the timeline are created in one component and include every construction step till the end of the timeline.

As long Autodesk has not F..ed up the Fusion 360 software architecture completely, I can't see a technical reason to implement this. It's just a replay of all the steps with on an other component. The only challenge I can see now, one will need to do some projections on every sketch. Finding the sources of the projections might be challenging, but for sure not impossible. It's just replay the steps on a different starting point.

Especially considering Fusion 360 once had a collaboration feature similar to multi user source code version management. This I can imagine is a nest of poisonous snakes and scorpions.

I am currently writing this after I found this post for the second times in this week being in exactly above described situation (construction till late into the night, better morning).

It's really frustrating to realise: it's nerly finished! Hey, let's start again!

[bsg6BCE]

Curious if in 2023 anything has changed?

I would love to be able to model things without committing to timeline organization initially, and then be able to organize timeline events in sub-components afterward.

[jm.10]

Nearly 3 years later... is this seriously still a problem? I need to move a few timeline features that were created in the "top level" document into a component instead. Telling me to just "redo all the work" is insane and will not be accepted as an answer.

To be explicit, this is what needs to happen:

1. Create a part, using any combination of sketches, features, etc.

2. Create a component

3. Put all of the features into that component as if the component had been created from the beginning, WITHOUT re-creating ANY of the features

Explain how step 3 can be accomplished. The resulting feature tree must be indistinguishable from the one that would result from creating the component first.

[TheCADWhisperer]

@jm.10 

Can you Attach an example file here?

[jm.10]

All you need is one feature:

1. Sketch a rectangle (any size)

2. Extrude (any thickness)

3. Create -> New Component

Even if I did upload an "example" it would take far longer to download/import. 🤣

The question is how to take that extrude and get it into the new component WITHOUT recreating it. The same process would apply to any number of features.

[TheCADWhisperer]

---

@jm.10 wrote:

Even if I did upload an "example" it would take far longer to download/import. 🤣

---

@jm.10 

I don't know what this means. 

Can you post an example?

Only takes seconds to do what you want.

I created a video on the process last week for another user here.

(And their issue was more complex than what you just described.)

[jm.10]

I mean I described a repeatable example that takes <5 seconds to make. It's going to take you far longer than that just to import the file into Fusion. But here it is anyway.

All I want to do is move the features (sketch/extrude) into that new component. This example is simple, but imagine that a significant amount of work has been done and then the design changes such that multiple components are needed. There obviously must be a way to do that, because surely the intended method cannot be to recreate the entire thing step by step. This simple change should take just a few seconds. Surely.

[TrippyLighting]

@jm.10 That is a pretty bad example, as this is dead easy to achieve.

Drag the sketch into the component. Done!

In general, I agree with the sentiment that there is a lack of proper timeline management features. Still, there are better ways to demonstrate that than a loudmouth post associated with a file of questionable content that then exhibits a lack of basic skills!

[jm.10]

I've tried dragging the sketch before (I had seen it mentioned) and it never worked, leading me to think it was yet another removed feature or a bug. But I just tried it again (three times) - and it worked one out of the three times. So there's still absolutely some sort of glitch that means this only works randomly. I can't replicate the glitch currently. Possibly some sort of caching issue or cloud outage that was preventing it from working earlier?

But the solution still only works if there's only a single body derived from a sketch. It's very common to use an initial "layout" sketch to drive multiple bodies. I've attached a simple example of that. Explain how to move only the extrude (but NOT the sketch, since the sketch will still be used as the basis for another component later) into the component.

I do apologize for the tone earlier. There are very few computer applications that get me this angry. I used SOLIDWORKS for many years and NX before that. They had bugs, sure, but I don't think there was a single time that it was bad enough to cause mental anguish. Fusion does that almost every day. 😅

[TheCADWhisperer]

@jm.10 

It is all about parent/child relationships - just like SolidWorks. (CSWP since 2007)

Video to follow...

[jeff_strater]

"So there's still absolutely some sort of glitch that means this only works randomly. I can't replicate the glitch currently. Possibly some sort of caching issue or cloud outage that was preventing it from working earlier?"

No.  It has nothing to do with cloud outages or caching, nor is it random.  None of those operations have anything to do with the cloud at all.  That processing is all done locally.  Whether you can restructure a sketch into another component is completely deterministic, and depends entirely on dependencies between the sketch and other components in the design.  I'll try to come up with a simple case later that illustrates this.

"I used SOLIDWORKS for many years and NX before that. They had bugs, sure, but I don't think there was a single time that it was bad enough to cause mental anguish. Fusion does that almost every day."

That is at least partly because you are using Internal components, a feature which neither Solidworks nor NX has.  Just as a reminder:  You can use Fusion exactly as you used Solidworks - building up parts that are entirely self-contained, and assembling them into sub-assemblies and assemblies contained in separate designs. I will not claim that there are no bugs in this "external only" workflow, but my guess is that you would not have these kinds of frustrations if you chose that modeling style.  There is even a new feature, which I think is still in preview, but is available, that will simply constrain the UI to make it impossible to even create local components, if you choose, and make you declare up front whether a design is a "part" or "assembly".  However, in my opinion, the ability to create components without creating a separate design, and the flexibility of not having to declare part or assembly up front is one of Fusion's super powers.  Using this, though, does come with some complexity.  The ownership of things like sketches, features, work geometry, etc is one of them.  This is much less clear-cut than if you have things nicely separated into different designs.  And yes, definitely, restructuring things when using Internal components is one area where Fusion could use some work.  I'd love to see it get better at that.

"Explain how to move only the extrude (but NOT the sketch, since the sketch will still be used as the basis for another component later) into the component"

No, there is no way to do that.  The ownership of features is a bit of a strange concept in Fusion to begin with, and one of those areas where I would like to see improvement.  In your simple case, what I would like to be able to do is:  

1. reorder the component creation feature to before the extrude (necessary because you cannot extrude into a component that does not yet exist.  Remember:  the timeline is really like a time machine.  Things happen in the order that they appear in the timeline).  You can do this, today, in your simple example.  Again, that might be limited in more complex examples, because of dependencies (you cannot reorder a feature before another feature on which it is dependent)
2. roll the timeline back before the extrude.  You can do this today
3. activate the newly-created component.  You can do this today
4. roll the timeline past the extrude.  You can do this today
5. edit the extrude, and thereby change the target component (because it is now active).  This is what you cannot do today, unfortunately

Hope this helps to explain things a bit.

[jm.10]

That's exactly what I figured. I had already tried multiple variations of what effectively are steps 1-4. The problem is that once the component is selected you cannot even access the extrude to "edit" it to force it into the component. There's no reason that should be difficult.

The issue with the "part/assembly" style of modeling in Fusion is the ****ing edit limit. They've effectively locked us out of it, leaving the half-baked component method the only viable option.

[jm.10]

That moves the body into the component, but not the feature. The requirement is for the resulting design to have the features contained in the component node, as if they had been modeled with that component active to begin with.

The other answers also seem to agree that this is impossible. Fusion's feature tree UI simply is incapable of dealing with anything more than the simplest cases, it seems.

The reason it's important is for proper organization during any later editing of the design. The way components work now, it is extremely easy to accidentally model a feature while in the "wrong" component, which results in a complex/weird feature tree that is difficult to navigate. And yes, in a perfect world you'd know precisely what order you need to model the features in beforehand, but reality is always complicated. In every other CAD package, it's possible to move features around later (using various tools) to get them ordered/grouped/organized in a logical way as long as it fits within the confines of the dependencies. Critically, if there are two valid structures, it is possible to convert between them somehow. Fusion, though, is the only one I know of where it's impossible to move from one valid structure to another valid structure. And it's not because it's technically not possible, it's simply because the program lacks the tools to do it.

Actually to be fair, FreeCAD deserves an honorable mention here. While it probably can do it, there's a 110% chance that the entire design will implode... yes, 110%, because FreeCAD will go above and beyond and somehow manage to also break a feature before the change as well, for absolutely no comprehensible reason. 🤣 Fusion is a horrible UI but the kernel it's built on is sort of okay... so at least it's slightly better in that respect. Still not nearly as good as Parasolid... at least until you encounter zero thickness geometry.