Alignment from Manipulaor WB - won't work with clones or links ?

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LHC
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Location: Canadian Coffee Shop

Alignment from Manipulaor WB - won't work with clones or links ?

Post by LHC »

I'm exploring the concept of clones lately - in the part design workbench. I read the wiki, then tried out a few cloned bodies in part design. I then figured I would align them with the manipulator workbench but it seems weird things happen as a result. Is it a known thing that the alignment does not work with cloned bodies in the manipulator WB ? I was under the impression that all the align does is alter the placement of a body, and the placement of a clone is independent from the placement of the source body.

Maybe I am missing something basic here......

EDIT - after some fiddling around I discovered the same behavior with links to bodies as well as clones of bodies. If I try to align an original body and it's clone (or link) via faces - e.g. like stacking them - the link or clone moves but in such a way as it ends up translated in position from where it should be. And the translation is exactly the amount that I transformed the link or clone after it was first created and overlaid on the original body.
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M4x
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Re: Alignment from Manipulaor WB - won't work with clones or links ?

Post by M4x »

Please have a look at the big red banner at the top and provide the missing information. Screenshots are always helping by the way.
LHC
Posts: 321
Joined: Thu Sep 17, 2020 4:21 pm
Location: Canadian Coffee Shop

Re: Alignment from Manipulaor WB - won't work with clones or links ?

Post by LHC »

Attached file - try placing the clone on top of the original body with the alignment tool in the Manipulator Workbench and you wil see what I mean.

Having said that, I believe I may have found a janky/clunky solution - this looks to be related to a bug in the Manipulator that the creator of that workbench mentioned in a thread a few days or week ago when I was having a problem with positioning a body with a top level part container. It seems to be the same bug. I wasn't thinking about that thread as it was more discussing the part container aspect of the problem, where these are two objects in the root of the tree. I can't seem to find that thread at the moment. I'll edit and place it here later if I do find it.

If you go to the KICad / Stepup workbench, there is a command there that resets the placement of the object without actually moving it in 3d space. So, trying the following workflow seems to correct the problem.

- Starting in part design workbench - create clone of body, then transform so it's not overlaying the original
- Go to KICad/Stepup workbench and reset the placement of the clone without moving it using the command mentioned above
- Go to Manipulator workbench and align the clone as desired
- Go back to Part Design Workbench and continue working....

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EDIT - Found the thread and discussion about this issue. Strangely it was located in the main manipulator thread :lol:
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 60#p515417


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OS: Windows 10 (10.0)
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.20.25311 (Git)
Build type: Release
Branch: master
Hash: c5524bb58a7126fa2242d6137eb82ee9d54e82d4
Python version: 3.8.10
Qt version: 5.12.9
Coin version: 4.0.0
OCC version: 7.5.2
Locale: English/United States (en_US)
Attachments
AlignTest.FCStd
(13.28 KiB) Downloaded 12 times
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M4x
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Re: Alignment from Manipulaor WB - won't work with clones or links ?

Post by M4x »

I guess you've found the answer yourself :mrgreen:
LHC
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Re: Alignment from Manipulaor WB - won't work with clones or links ?

Post by LHC »

M4x wrote: Thu Jul 29, 2021 9:30 pm I guess you've found the answer yourself :mrgreen:
A strange thing…..it happens but only rarely !
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