Exploding with Assembly4

[wtech2000]

I made a gearbox and I wanted to explode the parts. I tried the Exploded Assembly Workbench, but it didn't seem to work. I eventually found Assembly4's menu item Assembly > Release from Attachment and then manually Transformed the parts away from each other. It works fine for me, but I was curious if there's a better way to do this. Maybe stop Assembly4 from re-solving the assembly temporarily so I don't have to release everything before I can transform it?

I'm using FreeCAD v0.19 rev 22039.

gearbox exploded.PNG (171.52 KiB) Viewed 5037 times

[openfablab]

I am also interested in answer.

[Kunda1]

Moved to Assembly subforum

pinged by pinger macro

[Zolko]

I eventually found Assembly4's menu item Assembly > Release from Attachment and then manually Transformed the parts away from each other. It works fine for me, but I was curious if there's a better way to do this.

Nice find, well done. Currently there is nothing better, but of you look carefully you can see that for an Asm4 Model, there is a property Parameters > Configuaration with a drop-down selection: this was foreseen to cover this use-case, but is not yet implemented. I wanted to put in here not only various offsets, but also hide/visible options. The goal being to make assembly step-by-step instructions.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to store the necessary information, and also I don't have time to do this right now. If someone wants to step in ...

Maybe stop Assembly4 from re-solving the assembly temporarily so I don't have to release everything before I can transform it?

Assembly4 uses FreeCAD's built-in ExpressionEngine to calculate the parts placements, and I don't think it's possible to temporarily deactivate them globally.

[mfasano]

Maybe stop Assembly4 from re-solving the assembly temporarily so I don't have to release everything before I can transform it?

Assembly4 uses FreeCAD's built-in ExpressionEngine to calculate the parts placements, and I don't think it's possible to temporarily deactivate them globally.

I had asked about this in the Assembly4 thread. I found if you change the placement and do an Gui.updataGui(), it will update the viewscreen with the parts placement but not do a recompute that would apply expressions. Do a recompute and they will go back to the assembled positions

[Zolko]

I found if you change the placement and do an Gui.updataGui(), it will update the viewscreen with the parts placement but not do a recompute that would apply expressions. Do a recompute and they will go back to the assembled positions

May-be, but when you use the "Transform" tool, it doesn't give you the option: you can move an attached (linked) part as you want, but as soon as you click "OK" it snaps back to it's attached position.

Or do you mean something else ?

[mfasano]

I found if you change the placement and do an Gui.updataGui(), it will update the viewscreen with the parts placement but not do a recompute that would apply expressions. Do a recompute and they will go back to the assembled positions

May-be, but when you use the "Transform" tool, it doesn't give you the option: you can move an attached (linked) part as you want, but as soon as you click "OK" it snaps back to it's attached position.

Or do you mean something else ?

I was changing the placements of the links given output from a multibody dynamics solver(MBDyn) for an animation from a python program; I was not using the transform tool.

[project4]

Teaser for work in progress feature...
Original part:

Screenshot from 2020-09-27 18-42-27.png (17.12 KiB) Viewed 4473 times

Exploded:

Screenshot from 2020-09-27 18-42-15.png (27.02 KiB) Viewed 4473 times

[Zolko]

Teaser for work in progress feature... Original part:

nice ... hum, where did I see that part before ?

[iyd2019]

Teaser for work in progress feature...

Hi there!

Any update on this?

Regards