Assembly3 preview

[realthunder]

One feature request, do You think we can have angle alignment splitted in vertical angle and horizontal angle?

Do you mean to have an angle offset, say in the PlaneAlignment, such that once set, the two planes form an angle instead of being coplanar? Hmm... should be doable if I understand you correctly.

[easyw-fc]

I'm testing your Links with my StepUp WB and every is working just fine... Moreover Links are fantastic for a component re-used many times i.e. resistors with the same case or switch-buttons etc..

Exactly, I have that use case in mind long before I started asm3. In fact, even before I started working on Link.

Hi @realthunder,
here a simple comparison between loading a board with 50pcs of the same switch with:
1) the old method (using a copy-paste chaching)
2) the new method with Assembly Links

No need to say a word!

1) old one

loading-with-caching.gif (844.14 KiB) Viewed 601 times

2) new with Links

loading-with-links.gif (856.9 KiB) Viewed 601 times

[easyw-fc]

I wanted to export the assembly as a step, but it doesn't generate any file.

I played with a quite complex assembly, by activating autorelax, replacing some "plane alignment" with "point on plane" did the wanted result! and more adjustable than asm2!

Hi @Turro75 @realthunder
I've developed a macro to convert an Assembly of Parts with Body & Links to a Hierarchy of Parts with Shapes.
This can then be exported to STEP
here a small screencast of the Macro at work:

A3ToPartHierarchy.gif (934.36 KiB) Viewed 594 times

and here the two files:

bride_hydrau_asm3-r2.FCStd

(517.55 KiB) Downloaded 19 times

bride_hydrau_asm3-r2-STEP.zip

(221.03 KiB) Downloaded 17 times

@Turro75 ... I would like to test it with complex Assemblies... would you mind to share some?

Maurice

[Turro75]

One feature request, do You think we can have angle alignment splitted in vertical angle and horizontal angle?

Do you mean to have an angle offset, say in the PlaneAlignment, such that once set, the two planes form an angle instead of being coplanar? Hmm... should be doable if I understand you correctly.

Well, actually I mean that an anglealignment between 2 planes requires to specify if the angle is on pitch, roll or yaw, sometimes this can be handled with additional constraints, but not always.

[Turro75]

@Turro75 ... I would like to test it with complex Assemblies... would you mind to share some?

Maurice

the assemblies I usually handle are 30MB to 100MB, I have one >400MB which I wasn't able to handle unless I switched to a 64bits OS.....
I'm really curious to see how it work.

Unfortunately there are a lot of company objs in my steps, I'm not allowed to share them.
By the way I can (have to) test this macro, if You send it to me.

[realthunder]

Well, actually I mean that an anglealignment between 2 planes requires to specify if the angle is on pitch, roll or yaw, sometimes this can be handled with additional constraints, but not always.

I see now. I'll add a new composite constraint for that.

[easyw-fc]

@Turro75 ... I would like to test it with complex Assemblies... would you mind to share some?

Maurice

the assemblies I usually handle are 30MB to 100MB, I have one >400MB which I wasn't able to handle unless I switched to a 64bits OS.....
I'm really curious to see how it work.

Unfortunately there are a lot of company objs in my steps, I'm not allowed to share them.
By the way I can (have to) test this macro, if You send it to me.

The macro is here:
https://gist.github.com/easyw/049e0a2f8 ... 918bfbfb94

Configure a toolbar button with it, select an Assembly container an click on the button.

For your type of files it could take quite a long to copy the structure... It is doubling the project... but then you could export the project to Step with a hierarchy until this will be natively supported
Backup your project before any test

Let me know how it works...
M

[Eric Myers]

Hi Realthunder, or anyone else who is running the preview that might be able to help.

I'm having some problems getting basic constraints to do what I think they should. I'll post examples as separate messages in case it's easier to answer that way.

My first problem is-- the "lock" constraint doesn't seem to really lock. Hopefully the screencast makes it clear what I mean. I select a plane in the "Link_reference_frame" part, hit the lock constraint, and am still able to move the part around.

no_lock.gif (956.5 KiB) Viewed 364 times

[realthunder]

My first problem is-- the "lock" constraint doesn't seem to really lock. Hopefully the screencast makes it clear what I mean. I select a plane in the "Link_reference_frame" part, hit the lock constraint, and am still able to move the part around.

The lock constraint is to prevent the solver to move the constrained part. You can of course manually move the part, which causes the solver to gather other movable parts around the newly located fixed part.

[Eric Myers]

My next major problem is- I can't seem to find any way to define a simple concentricity constraint between two axial features that doesn't depend on the global coordinate system of the two parts.

In other words, I would expect to be able to select a cylindrical surface on each of the two parts being constrained, or an axis of one part and cylindrical feature of another, or two axes, etc..., and be able to constrain these so that the associated axes are collinear.

As this is an early preview I could understand not having the functionality to be able to infer axes from cylindrical or conical features yet. But even after defining explicit axes, I can't seem to force them to take the collinear constraint. I just get an error "list index out of range"

I may be completely missing something, would really appreciate a hint if so.

no_concentric.gif (348.5 KiB) Viewed 357 times