Timeline cleanup

[Anonymous]

After compleating a design, I want to clean up the timetime. Are there commands to do this?. For example, if a component was grounded and then immediatly ungrounded this stays in the timeline unless manually deleted. Is there any automatic process that will make the timeline more efficient?

[ScottWertel]

If not, please log this in the Ideastation.  I would love a prune/purge feature to clean up the timeline.

Right now, after every few  hours of design, I step through the timeline and manually clean it up.  If I don't, finding the right place in the timeline to do an edit later is difficult.  Having an automated method to expunge useless or contradictory moments in time would be very beneficial, and hopefully decrease file size and improve performance.

[jeff_strater]

Yeah, there is no automatic way to do this.  I do what @ScottWertel does.  Every once in a while I go through and clean up the timeline.  I've more or less learned to avoid the ground/unground problem, and having too many Move features, but every once in a while it helps to clean as you go.

The other thing that I've started to do a lot is to aggressively name everything.  Every sketch, every work geometry, every feature.  That helps me a lot, later, to go back and figure out what I've done.  I then try to re-arrange the timeline so there is some coherent order to it (all the features related to some design task are next to each other).  This is tricky, because doing so requires you to not have unnecessary references that would prevent the reorder.  Inadvertent or unnecessary projected geometry in a sketch is the prime offender.  This is why I turn off autoproject completely, and often will put a workplane on a face and sketch on that, rather than just on the face itself.  I only want to project geometry that I know I will need.  After I've reordered the timeline as much as I can, I go back and create timeline groups, and give them meaningful names.  The result is pretty good.

Here is a timeline I've done that for.  Here is the collapsed version:

And the fully expanded version is about 3 complete pages worth of features:

Jeff Strater (Fusion development)

[ScottWertel]

Wow, that's nice @jeff_strater.

The easiest tool for me to use to clean up the timeline is Undo.  I seriously use Undo more in Fusion 360 than I have in any other CAD program, except maybe AutoCAD.  Funny how the Autodesk tools seem to rely on Undo to keep the dataset clean.  When I find myself creating a timeline feature to "test" a concept and then making another entry to remove it, I've trained myself to go back and UNDO instead.  But that requires paying attention to the actions that create a timeline event and those that don't.

Prune/Purge could be very difficult to implement.  For example, I move a face and then immediately move it back.  But what if the move isn't exact (rounding errors and all)?  Will Fusion alter the initial move to only the delta value of the two?

I can see, though, being able to parse the timeline and remove certain events:

1. Ground, then an immediate unground.  Advanced prune/purge to remove a ground that has an unground later in the timeline that didn't affect the relative geometry.
2. Unused reference geometry: planes, axis, etc.  But this one has to have manual input before deleting because some reference geometry may be used for external references.  Advanced prune/purge would check for external references within all A360 projects.
3. Move/reposition components that later have relationships added to them.  Obviously there must be a dependency check before deleting the move, but the relationship should control the location and the move isn't necessary.  In my particular use case, I move components all the time because I'm tweaking sizes and haven't built any relationships into the model yet.  Then I add relationships.  Then I go back through the timeline and delete all those moves I made just to get measurements.  Or, as stated above, I move, get the measurement, then UNDO, then modify the geometry until I'm actually ready to "assemble" the model.  Like Jeff's example above, my technique probably isn't very effecient but I like keeping certain timeline entries near eachother (with or without grouping).  It makes editing a model in the future easier.

[TrippyLighting]

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@jeff_strater wrote:

The other thing that I've started to do a lot is to aggressively name everything.  Every sketch, every work geometry, every feature.  That helps me a lot, later, to go back and figure out what I've done.

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That is one of the easiest things to do and should actually be Fusion 360 Rule#2 - Name your stuff (Dammit!)

No features necessary, no coding, can be done right now and is very unlikey to cause any crashing 😉

[justin.megawarne]

Apologies for opening an old thread. But had a sort of related thought, and in a different domain: the notion of cleaning up a timeline reminds me very much of preparing a patch series in Git, in software development.

I will often commit away until I’m happy with my changes, then rewrite the changes in a clean branch, creating a more “logical” commit series. That helps reviewers read the commits in order, which are now more like a story, rather than contending with a complicated diff.

Once they have made suggestions, I can often rebase them into that logical commit series and maintain the order for future readers, even after the PR is merged.