Unable to create joints without design history turned on

[ritste20]

Recently I've started turning off the capture design history in my assemblies because I end up with a lot of joints and capture position events. Really slows things down after a while.

Last night I went to start a new assembly and Fusion is telling me it fails to create joint geometry no matter what I try, until I re-enable the design history. I also tried turning the history back off after creating some joints and Fusion deleted what I had assembled so all the components were left floating again.

I don't know if this is related to a new update that came out or what. Has anyone else experienced this?

Thanks,

Steve Ritter

[jeff_strater]

in general, joints seem to work OK in Direct Modeling from what I can see.  Can you share this design here so we can investigate?

[ritste20]

As I said before, I was able to start working in the assembly environment with the history turned on. So this file has been edited and saved a couple times since the screencast recording.

After exporting this version, I just tried to disable the design history again and all of the joints shown in the browser come up with the ! trianles and says the geometry cannot be found.

I tried to replicate the issue with a fresh document and I was able to make a joint with and without the history turned on so this might not be a re-occurring thing?

Steve

[jeff_strater · Accepted solution]

yikes!  I can certainly reproduce this.  It is indeed strange.  It is certainly a bug of some kind, just not sure yet what kind.  I tried reproducing it on a new design with some of those same components, and either starting with a new direct modeling design or starting with a parametric design, adding joints, converting to direct, and adding more joints, I did not see the problem.  The one thing I did notice was that, right after the conversion, ALL joints show this error:

That is the first symptom of the problem.  But, even deleting every one of those joints does not cure the problem.  I still cannot create new joints, either with the existing components or newly-inserted ones.

I've created FUS-69058 as a Fusion bug to track this.

The one piece of information I noticed from this design is that it appears that you've used edit-in-place on some/all of these components.  Is that correct?  That may be a clue here, but I don't know for sure.

Thanks for being willing to share the design.  Hopefully it is something small we can fix.

[jeff_strater]

another comment:  You say "I've started turning off the capture design history in my assemblies because I end up with a lot of joints and capture position events. Really slows things down after a while".  Yes, that is certainly the case.  However, many of those "Capture Position" features are not really necessary.  If you are just moving a component out of the way to create a Joint, and all you have moved is the components you are joining, the Capture is not necessary.

See the screencast below - the Capture here is not necessary, and can be deleted without affecting the design at all.

Now, you might ask:  "why can't Fusion do this for me?".  That project is one we are hoping to get going soon, but unfortunately there are corner cases that make it a bit difficult, so it's taking a bit longer that we'd hoped.  Anyway, it's a good idea to get into the habit, if you are using parametric assemblies, to just delete those Captures as soon as they are created.

screencast:

[ritste20]

Thanks @jeff_strater  for looking into this. Let me see if I can hit all the highlights.

No edit in place. I was using a template file with the length of the feature extrude set as a parameter so I could quickly edit the file and save as to create a new length component for use in the assembly. (Poor work-around for me missing frame generator tools from Inventor, hint hint). Originally I had a generic template where the sketch dimensions of the profile were also set as parameters but I deleted those params and set the sketch dimensions to hard values in the hopes they were what was causing the issue. This didn't seem to change anything but maybe something else to try to recreate the symptom. Some of the parts I believe were opened, edited, and "get latest" applied after they were placed in the assembly so maybe that's why you were thinking edit in place.

As far as the capture position events, I try not to do it whenever possible but sometimes if one of my parts is situated on the origin I have to move the new component to define joints because I can't see them. One of the files I was working in had ~1500 joints and that was when I found out just how much the performance is affected by the design history.

Let me know if I missed anything.

Steve

[jeff_strater]

@ritste20 - thanks.  I think you answered every question that I had.  The team is looking at this design, no other information at the moment.  

[chrisplyler]

Your "move it to create a joint because you couldn't see it" situation is exactly what Jeff is talking about where you can delete the Capture Position event after you have created the joint.

Other performance tips...

Select a bunch of motion joints and "suppress" them while you're working on other stuff.

Several rigid joints might be replaced with a single Rigid Group.

[kharrisonLQZFZ]

man im facing the same problem and it is very annoying