vocx wrote: ↑Sun Apr 28, 2019 8:07 am
Is this true?
Yes it is!
vocx wrote: ↑Sun Apr 28, 2019 8:07 am
For mechanical parts there are usually lots of screws, bolts, nuts, washers, etc. These are relatively small components, but they are very often imported from libraries and reused. In the other threads you have mentioned that your wood pieces are often of regular dimensions, so I think they should be reusable enough.
Most of the parts used in mechanical projects are standardized parts that are often used in different projects like some bolts that are used in one type of engine but also can be used in another kind of mechanical construction too. So it makes sense to have a library of this kind of standardized parts.
The vast majority of parts that a woodworker uses in a planned furniture project are specifically designed for that specific project. A cabinet built to fit in one specific space in your kitchen will be different than a cabinet built to fit in a space in my kitchen. In addition those constituting parts are so simple to model that it is easier to model a new one than to search for one that you've done before. In general they're just board peaces (a cuboid usually with a fixed thickness) an you just define it's width and length. Sometimes they can be a little more complex when you need some kind of groove or hole in it but even so they will be unique to this specific project. And each time you build a project you will have a lot of different small parts like that assembled to shape your model. A project of the furniture of a kitchen can easily have 300 or more different parts like that.
Is not that you don't use standardized parts like screws in a furniture project but in general they just doesn't matter. At least in the project they doesn't matter because they're something you will take care in the execution only. The project of a furniture serve some purposes:
- The woodworker will be able to have a visual representation to see if it will work as expected and if that's the case to change something before cutting a part in the wrong way. It avoids waste of time and material.
- The woodworker will be able to extract from the model the amount of material to be bought (how many boards to buy, how many hinges, etc.) and the cutting plan (how to cut the boards with minimum waste).
- To show to the customer how the ended job will look like. (You can display a rendered image with a better appearance than the haw 3D model)
So the project doesn't have to be perfect. But it have to serve those purposes.
vocx wrote: ↑Sun Apr 28, 2019 8:07 am
There are already many assembly workbenches that creating yet another one will be diluting the effort. As far as I can tell, this is precisely what Assembly3 is supposed to address, namely doing assembly in the same file that holds the individual parts. This is possible in Catia, where the CATProduct holds the entire assembly, composed of CATParts (the individual objects). Accessing and modifying the individual parts is possible from within the assembly file (CATProduct), without needing to open each individual piece (CATPart) to do a modification.
This furniture workbench should not be another assembly workbench but it should offer tools to address the woodworker's needs and it seems that one of the biggest problems for one to design a furniture by using FreeCAD is indeed the difficulty to assemble things on it and as it seems it is really complex and time consuming without a proper tool. Honestly I didn't even have given Assembly3 a try mainly because (as I've understood it right) it only works in a fork. It is not simply a workbench and so I can't install it in my already installed FreeCAD.
vocx wrote: ↑Sun Apr 28, 2019 8:07 am
Perhaps you have missed them, but as external workbenches there are many workbenches that help you perform assemblying.
Maybe but I would really like to have my parts constrained in a way that if I change something in one part, my model doesn't break.
vocx wrote: ↑Sun Apr 28, 2019 8:07 am
Some, like A2plus and Assembly3, are true assembly workbenches, because they include a way to constrain features of one object to another.
That's nice but I've already discarded those because they just don't work with parts that aren't imported from another file. (that's really bad!)
vocx wrote: ↑Sun Apr 28, 2019 8:07 am
Other workbenches, like Assembly4, Manipulator, or WorkFeature include tools to manage the positioning of the bodies in space, in order to quickly assemble the objects, without relying on a solver to calculate constraints. Maybe you should check all those options before trying to create yet another assembly solution that may only work well for your particular use case.
Yes! If that's a possibility, I think we should maybe give it a try. I've been trying extensively to use FreeCAD for modeling furniture and it has been a hard work. It is annoying to not be able to find ways to easy my tasks to achieve this in FreeCAD.
vocx wrote: ↑Sun Apr 28, 2019 8:07 am
I don't know how complex your furniture is, but I don't think it could be much more complex than the examples that you can see in the user's showcase subforum. In there you can see complex assemblies that were produced many years ago, just by aligning the bodies together. It isn't the easiest job, but if you are dedicated enough you can create pretty good assemblies.
I've been searching for furniture specific use cases in FreeCAD and I was able to find some indeed. But very simple ones. I'm building a model from all the planned furniture for my mom's kitchen and I've been able to achieve this with the tools FreeCAD already provides (with parametric dimensions and positions). But I will not lie. It has been a really tough task. So I believe it is possible. But I think it should be easier.
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