To move a grounded object, must always first unground?

[t_chapman6XJ7J]

If you have a component that is grounded, and other components in that component that are grounded also, is is always required to unground anything you want to move?  I have moved things accidentally by just grabbing the object and dragging before and am starting to ground things as a habit.  Trying to move something using move/copy I thought would have still worked because it is an intentional move but I guess you must unground, make the move, then ground again always?

I have noticed today that a grounded object could still be dragged by clicking on it with the mouse, even though it said grounded to parent. 

[TrippyLighting · Accepted solution]

I am assuming you are referring to "Ground to parent'
If you want to move a component, either by dragging or by using the move feature, you'll have to first unground it from the parent.

After moving it you won't be able to ground it to the parent again. and you'll have to use the capture position feature followed by a rigid group joint.

We generally discourage users to use that workflow. Joint are the best way to locate components.

If you can still move/drag a component that is grounded to it's parent then that parent isn't grounded to it's parent.  

[Drewpan · Accepted solution]

Hi,

As @TrippyLighting mentioned, we discourage using the move component workflow. There are many reasons for this

including kludging up the timeline and causing various performance issues. A preferred method works like this.

You would typically have one grounded component, usually the first one but not always. You then have a couple of

choices about how you go about designing the other parts and joining them together. One method involves working

around the Origin and designing your following components. In order to do this you often have to turn the visibility

of your first component or assembly so you can actually see what you are doing by using the little eye icons in the

browser tree. Once you have designed the new part you then use a joint to place them into the assembly and start

on the next part.

The second method is by directly building off the previous part and using some point on the part as your origin. This

allows you to actually create the part exactly where it is meant to be in the assembly but it isn't yet joined up to the

assembly. To join it up you would use an As Built joint. This is called the building in place method.

Both of these methods avoid having to move the various parts of the assembly around except when you create the

joins. You should be using the visibility eye icons when you need them to see what is going on and avoid moving parts

out of the way so you can see. Every time you move a part it creates a move in the timeline that fusion calculates

from. If you have multiple moves then fusion will be recalculating each time before finally calculating the final

position. This can affect performance quite severely on complex assemblies.

So the bottom line is - design at the origin or in place; use joins to connect the parts of the assembly; turn visibility

on and off as required to see what you are doing; ground only one part unless it is absolutely necessary; avoid the

move command;

Cheers

Andrew

[TrippyLighting · Accepted solution]

---

@Drewpan wrote:

...

One method involves working

around the Origin and designing your following components. In order to do this you often have to turn the visibility

of your first component or assembly so you can actually see what you are doing by using the little eye icons in the

browser tree.

---

In larger assemblies, the "Isolate " function is very helpful. Isolating a component hides all other components. Unisolating it gets you back to the previous state. 

---

@Drewpan wrote:

...

The second method is by directly building off the previous part and using some point on the part as your origin. This

allows you to actually create the part exactly where it is meant to be in the assembly but it isn't yet joined up to the

assembly. To join it up you would use an As Built joint. This is called the building in place method.

---

Design/build-in-place is synonymous with a top-down design approach.

In Fusion, we also have a feature set called "Edit-in-place" that is named very similarly and is easily confused with the above but is actually more akin to a bottom-up design approach. 

---

@Drewpan wrote:

... ground only one part unless it is absolutely necessary; avoid the

---

The original "Ground" feature has been replaced with a much more useful "Ground to parent" functionality.

The old less useful "ground" feature now has been renamed to "Pin".

[t_chapman6XJ7J · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the information!  I need some method to avoid accidentally moving things which often happens when trying to rotate the view around to different angles but had not clicked the icon first.  So you are dragging around on the screen thinking you are rotating the image in 360 rotation but actually just grabbed a part and moved it, sometimes it is not obvious the part got moved until later. 

I am starting to ground to parent which is working well.  I can unground when I need to adjust a part, move it, then ground to parent again as many times as I want and this is solving the problem.

There are cases where I need to draw a system with some parts moved from point A to point B for demonstration as fixed points (render each position), as well as cases where I want to simulate parts moving from point A to point B. 

It is still not clear what Pin does, not finding the best document on that feature vs ground to parent. 

[jeff_strater]

"sometimes it is not obvious the part got moved until later. "

If any component has been moved, this UI will appear in the upper right corner of the Fusion window:

Clicking "Revert" will put all moved components back into their "home" locations.

Also, disabling component drag will prevent unintended component dragging for certain:

"It is still not clear what Pin does,"

Pin is what used to be Ground.  Documentation is here:  GROUND TO PARENT 

in short, both Ground to Parent and Pin do similar things - in a design, it prevents a component from moving.  Pin (formerly Ground), however, does not survive if you Insert that design into another design.  Ground to Parent, however, is brought across (it does not ground that component in the destination design, but it does keep ir fixed relative to that design's root)