Position of components shifted in edit joint view

[Anonymous]

Hi,

My model has not been finished and it's quite a mess so I shared just the pictures of it. Here are what I was trying to do:

1. I have a worm and a worm gear positioned and motion linked

2. While their motion ratio is correct, they are clipping, so I would like to adjust the initial rotation of one of them

3. I tried to use edit joint and change the offset angle. When I click the spur gear joint edit, it shows missing reference.

4. When I click the worm joint edit, I could rotate it, but there are unrelated components, the ball bearing and cut into the housing, following the angle offset. 

5. In editing either joint, the positions of stuff just mess up, so I can find reference in adjusting the angle or position. I did capture position after applying joint to them, but that does not work.

So here are my questions:

1. Is there a way to delete the reference to other components (in this case the worm), and make the components look like and position as they are now?

2. How to maintain the assembled position of stuff when editing joint? Is that weird positioning from where things were when I added that joint?

My apologies for not strictly following the workflow, but please help me solve this for now. The clipping animation itself is not a big issue, but I do need to edit other joints with similar problems.

Regards,

[jeff_strater]

it's really impossible to tell from just screen images what is going on.  We'd need to see the design itself.  One thing to  know, however, is that Edit Joint causes a rollback to the point in the timeline when the Joint was created.  So, any positioning that happens after the Joint will be rolled back.

The missing reference is a second problem.  Again, we'd need to see the design to give more help.  But, it looks like some geometry is missing that was used in the joint.  You may have to re-select this geometry.

[Anonymous]

Hi Mr. Strater,

Thank you for replying me!Please find the file attached.

That "position of components roll back to when the joint was created" answers alot about my confusion. Does that mean I should place things in place before adding joints? But that sound more like a case where As-built joints are used, and some times its hard to select the joint point when things overlap.

Another workflow issue is that, I was trying to first make a revolute joint between the worm and the gear, the rotation axle of which will be perpendicular, like in real life. And then to make the housing based on their position. but I couldn't find a way to do that as joint offset changes the rotary axle too. I ended up making the housing first and connecting worm and gear respectively to the housing with joints instead.

Thank you again for your support.

Jianing Liu

[jeff_strater · Accepted solution]

Thanks for sharing the model.  To answer this question:  "Does that mean I should place things in place before adding joints?".  The answer is: no, this is not required, or even necessarily a good practice.  The point of the Joint is to bring the components into the correct orientation, so there should be no need to pre-position them.

I took a look at the model.  I'm not sure what the missing component in that joint is intended to be the washer here:

from the picture in your first post, it looks like it is some kind of a hole through the body, maybe?

you will probably need to just re-select the second half of that joint.

I'm not sure I understand the issue in your second workflow question, but if you've found a way to make it work, then that is probably a good workflow.