Joint position in drawings

[Anonymous]

I think this is going to be another problem with capturing positions.   I'm using 'align' to move things around and then joint-in-place to lock everything as it is.  BUT.. the little joint icons seem to be floating in space (below and to the right of the cubes):

joint position

Just fooling around I did another similar thing which makes it more obvious that the joints are floating:

lots of joints

I'm guessing that when I moved the aggregate component to put the component at the design origin, it looks like it didn't move the joints.  The joints are still there, where they belong, but it is near impossible to figure out which joint is connected between which components.

[karina.harper]

Hi @Anonymous 

Can you share the file with me? I'd like to log this with the dev team. I would try:

1. edit a joint

2. don't change anything

3. accept edits

or try

Modify -> compute all

Let me know if either of those works.

[Anonymous]

I haven't tried your suggestions yet, but here's the cube

floating joints

[Anonymous]

I tried both, no help.  But: when I did the "edit joint" the correct two cubes were selected but the little joint icon that was also selected was still nowhere near the joint.  I have no idea what I could have done wrong...

[jhackney1972 · Accepted solution]

I really do not know the Fusion 360 reason that caused the issue but I do know the cure.  Delete the "Move" before all of the applied joints.  Then after the joints, move the component back to the origin as you desired.  See Screencast.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, but I tried it and it didn't work.  I didn't do the exact thing you did so perhaps that's the difference.   I don't understand about the resetting the origin.  What I did was I deleted the offending move, and as you said the cube slid back under the joint icons.  I then moved the cube to the design origin the way I usually do: I selected the cube [and it correctly said "20 items selected"] and then did a move-to-position, coordinate 0,0,0 and the cube leapt back to the origin but left the joints behind.

you can see in the timeline that the move is now the last operation but still the joints are floating. I can make a screencast if it'd help to see what I did differently than you did. ????

[jhackney1972]

I did it by your method, with the move by position, and I same results as my screencast shows.  The assembly constraint icons move with the cube.  I have no idea of why yours will not respond.

[TrippyLighting · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous 

Have you been through any of the tutorials in the support and learning section?

You made so many mistakes in this simple design that I would recommend to spend some time there to get the upper hand on some  of Fusion 360 fundamentals.

I would stay away from the primitives especially the box primitive in Fusion 360.

When you created the rectangular sketch you should have picked the sketch origin and not place the first point of the rectangle into space.

When you do that your geometry aligns automatically with the origin. Keep it there! When I refer to geometry I refer to the body in a component, not a component. That way you don't need the body move feature to move it back to the origin. Saves some unnecessary work.

In your second step you scale that body. Not a good idea. You are in a parametric modeling environment. If you need to change the dimensions of your geometry, then edit the sketches and timeline features it was created with.

That also works better when you don't use the primitives 😉

Then you copy paste the cube component multiple times. It would have been a lot easier to pattern this and then remove (not delete) the unneeded instances.

The dimension of the cube is a parameter that is stored. You probably better define a user parameter and assign that to the dimension of the cube (well ... three dimensions). Then you can also use that parameter when patterning. So when you change the dimensions of the cube the pattern updates accordingly.

Then you can use a rigid group and things will update properly. In your design you manually moved the components and that does not work update when you change the dimension o the cube.

The biggest faux pas you made with the last move command in the timeline where you moved the body of the cube away from its origin in the component.  That is almost never a good idea unless it was intended for a particular purpose. I don't think it was intended  in this case.

This is also the reason the joint icons show up toward the side as they coincide with the origin of the component. As build rigid joints and rigid group don't require to select geometry so they reference the component origin. 

[Anonymous]

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@TrippyLighting wrote:

@Anonymous 

Have you been through any of the tutorials in the support and learning section?

You made so many mistakes in this simple design that I would recommend to spend some time there to get the upper hand on some  of Fusion 360 fundamentals.

Some of them, but I started with the "Fusion Mastery" lessons and I didn't like them -- it was too much of "do this" and not enough of "how does this work" {e.g., that I just learned that moves are always "provisional" and so revert/capture is necessary to "close" the move}. I'll start on the actual tutorials and try to be less clueless

When you created the rectangular sketch you should have picked the sketch origin and not place the first point of the rectangle into space.

When you do that your geometry aligns automatically with the origin. Keep it there! When I refer to geometry I refer to the body in a component, not a component. That way you don't need the body move feature to move it back to the origin. Saves some unnecessary work.

I confess that I am all confused about the plethora of "origins" and what they're for and what they do. In the past, I've tended to do things just in what I guess would be the "design coordinates" in F360. I've been a bit baffled by the "shadow" origin axes that pop up. I hope there's a tutorial that deals with all the reference frames and how to use them

In your second step you scale that body. Not a good idea. You are in a parametric modeling environment. If you need to change the dimensions of your geometry, then edit the sketches and timeline features it was created with.

...

Then you copy paste the cube component multiple times. It would have been a lot easier to pattern this and then remove (not delete) the unneeded instances.

The dimension of the cube is a parameter that is stored. You probably better define a user parameter and assign that to the dimension of the cube (well ... three dimensions). Then you can also use that parameter when patterning. So when you change the dimensions of the cube the pattern updates accordingly.

I trust the tutorials will show me what "patterning" means 🐵  what's painful is that what you're telling me are *standard* engineering things I already know and have used for decades, but in a different discipline. [I was a computer systems architect]. I have utterly underestimated F360 -- I have treated it like a fancy drawing program rather than as a serious engineering tool. I need to learn fewer design techniques and much more about how to think about how to use F360 properly. Thanks for the (beginning of my) education!

[Anonymous]

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@jhackney1972 wrote:

I did it by your method, with the move by position, and I same results as my screencast shows.  The assembly constraint icons move with the cube.  I have no idea of why yours will not respond.

---

I figured it out.  Turns out [as per my other reply] the number of fundamental things in F360 that I don't have a proper intuition for seems to be unbounded.  In this case I clearly don't understand the difference in different ways of "selecting" things.   I selected, and then moved, the cube by doing a "window select" -- that left the joints behind.   BUT if I selected the cube by selecting it from the browser the joints obediently obeyed.   I don't truly understand but I think that by selecting from the window I only selected the bodies and such in the cube, but not the joints.  When I selected from the browser I selected the entire component, including the joints.

As I mentioned in my other thread, I don't know enough about F360 as a tool rather than just a drawing program and make too many dumb mistakes.  So back to the tutorials, but with the goal of understanding, rather than just "how to".