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Kind of related and not sure how many people here work day in day out as design engineers, but how do you define parts in the 'internally defined in the part file' vs 'referentially defined in the assembly' dichotomy? I know its often more blurry than that, but generally as philosophies they seem like the two options. I'm very comfortable with solidworks and typically define my parts internally so they're more robust if I redesign the assembly, but it does result in a lot more time adjusting parts to match changes in other parts vs auto updates, ie having clearance holes in part A defined as matching the bolt hole pattern in part B vs having two unlinked bolt hole patterns in their individual files. Also related to working on parts in place in the assembly vs opening in their own window to edit there and then rebuilding the assembly model to reflect changes. I have a very good working understanding of most parts of solidworks from years of working with it but no formal training, started with a borrowed seat for personal projects and then working as a draftsman and now as a non-design engineer who usually only draws side projects myself. Related, I have a permanent license of SW that's off maintenance and is a 2016 edition, any idea if I swapped license keys to one under maintenance if I could update to 2020/21 and then swap back to my license? I have an OG grandfather license from like 2006 that's full functionality in perpetuity but doesn't include updates or support when I'm off maintenance . meowmeowmeowmeow fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Mar 31, 2021 |
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Mar 31, 2021 22:25
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Thanks for confirming, its a weird old license that our last VAR was really confused by when we went on maintenance last time - its a permanent seat for the full package in perpetuity and isn't linked to edition, but I can't upgrade without going on maintenance for a year. Like it was on 2012 until we needed it, so we went on maintenance for a year to get it to 2016 when we were working with externals and needed to work with their files, then dropped it again when we didn't and kept the 2016 without paying anything year to year. I'll check out the 3DX thing when it goes live, but rn I'm paying $0 for full SW+FEA+toolbox+routing and other than the UI and file compatibility I don't think I'm missing much from 2020. Only pain is I can't open personal projects on my work computer as I wont be able to open them again on my personal machine. Thanks for the info on top down vs bottom up, I usually do the same thing where I'll adjust in the assembly then blow up the external refs and redimension to fix, but when I get the top down process to work cleanly its a dream to go in and update things, especially when using configuration linked dimensions for versions of stuff. Like making a longer version of something and just updating a design table for the new config and having every part in the assembly rebuild as needed, but its only really simple to setup when I already have the design in my head and am just converting to CAD - if I'm sketching a deciding as I go getting all the references set up in advance is a disaster and involves a lot of rework. Its been especially funny learning Rhino and NURBS surfacing with a background in solid modeling and getting both mad at rhino for not being SW and mad at SW for not being Rhino - layers and hiding geo and things outside the timeline are all super helpful for slamming out some ideas, but having to manually redo processes every time you change a preceding decision vs auto rebuilding. Is SW ever gonna improve their surface handling? I haven't had to deal with it in a while but when I was doing mold design I was exporting my mold cavities from Rhino -> SW, doing my mold base design in SW, then going SW -> Rhino to replace my mold cavity surfaces because they always got hosed up by SW, then sending that file to my CAM program. If I went straight from SW to CAM all my surface blends would get messed up which was fun to discover AFTER cutting the mold, having not checked in masterCAM assuming that SW would have left my surfaces alone...
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Apr 1, 2021 00:40
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NewFatMike posted:Hmmm I haven't encountered anything in surfacing in 19-20-21 that would gently caress up blends and whatnot, unless you're doing something truly whacky like importing > boolean > scale, that would possibly keep surfaces from translating/offsetting currently. Maybe? I don't think it was too weird, taking closed poly surfaces from rhino and then turning them into solids for booleans to make cavities or using open surfaces to split solids to make mold halves. Usually could stay away from scaling or offsetting in SW, I think it was the closed surfaces to solids process that would gently caress up the surface edges, I'd lose my g2/g3 continuities sometimes. Not a big fan of sub-d modeling but haven't used it much, it's a shame autodesk bought t-splines as those were like a more robust and easier to use version of nurbs surfaces and I liked working with those in rhino. Maybe I will take a look at this 3dx thing, 100/year is pretty dang cheap. Will it run SW plug-ins like mastercam for SW? I try to avoid programming CAM in SW but for quick jobs it's nice to save the export/import loop and only have one program open and masterCAM is a pain to draw in.
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Apr 1, 2021 18:07
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Having not worked with subd much is there a way to take it back to solids/surfaces? They seem great for quickly modeling stuff but trying to work with the files for downstream stuff is a disaster, at least with the tools I'm using. I have spaceclaim and use it sometimes to reverse-engineer meshes to surfaces but sure don't enjoy it.
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Apr 1, 2021 21:33
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Neato, that's coming in rhino7? Will it work for subD models from other programs? One of my IDs uses blender and I hate working with the meshes that come out of there.
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Apr 1, 2021 23:11
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Ah cool, my company is still on 5/6 so maybe I'll give it a shot on my home machine - licenses are version specific yeah?
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Apr 1, 2021 23:18
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You'd do the revolved cut on a plane that goes through the axis of the hole, not the surface of the hole itself. You could also do an extruded cut on the top surface and offset the start of the cut so it's a groove not a cbore but the revolved cut is probably the better way to do it.
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Apr 5, 2021 16:34
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Dominoes posted:I think that's what I ended up with from the Groove tool. It was a list of specific o-ring standard widths under various standards. The hole wizard tool is similar to the groove tool in that it's more specific application but does a lot of the get dimensions from a book work for you. Or you can spec a m4x.7 threaded hole and it'll grab the tap.drill size, give you options for visualizing the major and minor diameters, etc. Same for counter sinks, choose you fastener type and head clearance and it'll make it deep enough. This is super valuable for any kind of shaft fits, choose your nominal diameter and desired type of fit and it'll put an appropriately dimensioned hole in the part for you. Knowing when to use a specific wizard type tool vs build the geometry yourself can take a bit of time but eventually becomes pretty smooth and can save massive amounts of time.
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Apr 5, 2021 21:19
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I have no idea for fusion but in SW you'd define those holes separately, one part would get m3 tapped to x depth and the other would get through hole for m3 fastener and you'd have to change them separately but the specific dimensions would auto update. I was in the process of trying to learn when I got SW at home and I'm not sure if it's from learning SW first but man it's more intuitive. And I'll never forgive fusion from not having an offset both sides function for sketch geometry.
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Apr 5, 2021 21:53
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That'd maybe work but I've decided I'll figure out fusion as soon as someone pays me to do so, the licensing getting better for SW and worse for fusion had taken away almost all my interest in learning it. Also having a CAM seat as well, fusion having CAD and CAM was a huge attraction.
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Apr 6, 2021 00:13
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Hole wizard is great, construction geometry is great, reference geometry is also great. 3d sketches are almost useful EXCEPT for laying out reference geometry stuff really quickly, and laying out curves for lofts and sweeps that are weird. Learning all your shaft fits can take longer than looking up the dimensions though, I'm still pretty bad at it and cheat most of the time by either drawing everything as nominal and than adjusting my fits in tool selection when I make things or in CAM - benefit of doing the whole thing end to end. I didn't realize the o-ring tool was a toolbox feature, I've got no idea how to use those and assumed it was more like the hole wizard than it is. Seems really powerful once you get it figured out though. One of my recent tricks is using more sketches than features, no idea if its good or bad practice but after getting used to layers in Rhino I found separating levels of details in different sketches can be really helpful. I'll draw reference geo to other parts in a sketch, do some big picture layout of my part in a sketch, then go in in new sketches and reference those for half my dimensions as I build solid features but separating it helps me with visual clutter and having common sketches across multiple features without attaching the sketches to other features. I got way to used to being able to hide things and turn layers off in Rhino which doesn't really translate to SW in either thinking or practice, but adding more intentional separation to my sketches has helped. E: oXDemosthenesXo posted:On an unrelated note, does anyone have any advice on how to convince my coworker that assemblies exist and are worth using? He constantly creates multibody parts that will end up with like 20 bodies in a part file, including Insert Parted fasteners. I'm not talking about master modeling either, he does this without ever creating assemblies. Protip to people learning Solidworks - pretend multibody doesn't exist until your competent with single bodies. Mates, tolerance analysis, motion analysis, BOM control, drawings, probably a half dozen other things of varying levels of niceness all depend(?) on assemblies. Easiest way is to just bully him into using them by either refusing to work on assemblies as part files or just turn his parts into assemblies and then send him the assembly back. Seems way harder to do it this way, every time I work in a multibody file I end up welding things together I didn't want together multiple times. meowmeowmeowmeow fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 6, 2021 04:00
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What's the best interchange format for 3d files that have surface, mesh, and solid geometry all together? .step?
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May 18, 2021 23:33
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simmyb posted:Rhino goons, I have a couple of basic questions maybe someone can help with. I have a mostly Solidworks/Onshape background so this stuff is a bit new to me. 1) not as far as I know, lasso and box have always been select everything 2) not sure if it'll work here but I usually flatten out things by rotating my part so what I want flat is along a coordinate axis plane and then using the scale slider on the gumball to scale the z height of my points to zero which makes them all planar normal to that axis if that makes sense.
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May 19, 2021 15:57
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I'd rebuild into non-stl files if you can, even if it's a headache, it'll be so much better in the long run. Im assuming you want to add some mechanical design features or something and not just scale and Boolean, so my really bad advice is to use a standin cavity for all our mold core design and then as a final step replace the cavities with your actual scaled cavity from rhino and either import body and cavity separately into CAM or combine them In SW/rhino at the end and hope it goes well, I'm pretty sure the biggest issue is that any mesh booleans on a solid body in SW will turn the body into a mesh and you won't be able to edit, but I'm not 100% sure here.
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May 26, 2021 23:46
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Don't surface in SW whatever you do if you have rhino, just don't. It's bad. Really bad.
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May 27, 2021 02:59
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For renders or for actually making parts?
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May 28, 2021 23:57
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Ambrose Burnside posted:Actual parts- my main interest here is making the decorative master models for molds/dies look more organic and authentic, maybe going so far as to deliberately imitate tooling marks to make designs *look* wrought in the correct way they would if i was working with hammer and anvil instead of mouse and keyboard. Not sure if it's an option for you but I've always had textures and finishes added via etching after machining the cavities. I think you might have a hard time machining the level of detail you're talking about and having it come through in the finished parts after polishing of the mood to remove the unwanted real tooling marks from mold machining, but ymmv. This has always been in a commercial environment where I can just open the texture reference book and call out some texture codes for certain parts of the cavity, no idea what I'd do if this was a home shop project.
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Jun 2, 2021 17:28
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I was drawing up a simple part yesterday and decided to do it in Rhino because I already had it open and it was fine for part design but making a drawing for it sure had me missing solidworks, all those automated tools sure are nice.
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Jun 18, 2021 17:20
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Imo never surface in SOLIDWORKS it's loving miserable and models come out like poo poo. Blender and subD modeling is a little easier to do but harder to.get exact dimensions, rhino and surface modeling will have a higher learning curve but better dimensional control and accuracy. The subD tools in rhino 7 might be the ticket for you but I haven't used them personally.
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Jul 15, 2021 01:46
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They mentioned needing dimensional accuracy and in my limited experience getting dead nuts on even simple dimensions can be hard due to the smoothing in subD modeling, you'll get ballpark easily but anytime you're working with meshes that are being smoothed you end up with weird dimensions in unexpected areas.
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Jul 15, 2021 02:18
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The rhino 7 subD tools convert back to NURBS which is the nice thing, you can get it close with subD and then pull sections and isocurves to use as a base when you adjust dimensions for final surfacing without having to deal with the bullshit problems of actual meshes at any point
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Jul 15, 2021 03:12
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Yes but more on the CAM side than CAD, and more in training and networking events than actual SW help. My VAR does demos with some local machine tool and cutting tool companies where they do a free lunch and talk through machining techniques, have a presentation on new tools for the cutting tool guy, then demo the tool path and tool on a fancy new machine. However, the one time I had an actual issue (master cam ran a tool through part geometry in a HSM lift move and didn't flag it as a collision during validation) they didn't help at all. My CAM VAR is different from my CAD VAR and the CAD guys are useless, but tbh I haven't tried their learning materials or seminars.
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Aug 19, 2021 21:40
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Ambrose Burnside posted:Is there any way to use SW mold tools to automatically clean up/de-undercut a model, once you've done draft/undercut analyses? I'm making some molds of fairly intricate parts with 3D textures applied, and there are a million tiny undercuts in the design that are impractical to clean up by hand but are also very small and would be remedied acceptably by just filling the model in everywhere with a draft lower than X degrees. I haven't don't it in a while but I think you can use draft analysis tool to save the split line where it goes from either positive/negative or crosses a specified draft angle, then use that line to extrude geometry to fill your negative or low draft spaces. I think you can extrude from the line with a draft angle, or you might have to create a ribbon surface and then extrude from surface or something to get it to work. This is my general approach to filling undercuts on models for moulding but it's been long enough I can't remember how much of it I did in SW vs Rhino vs MasterCAM.
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Sep 2, 2021 20:48
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Offsetting complex surfaces with automated tools can be a loving mess, sounds like some part of the process is generating self intersecting geometry or similar from the model having a radius smaller than your offset value and the typical trim function isn't working. Ideas on solutions: - find your sharpest radius on the model, soften it until offset works. Will require changing your hull shape - manually shell in blender by offsetting the hull there and cleaning it up until it imports cleanly into fusion, then solidify the shells into a solid - copy your hull, use fusion surface tools to scale and adjust until you have a good enough inner surface for printing, won't be as even thickness but probably most control here. You might try taking a bunch of sections and offsetting the sections by 5mm to create the internal she'll sections, them lofting into a surface. - do your surface prep in fusion instead of blender, see if that plays nicer - use a different program for surfacing, I got mad enough at SW surface tools to learn rhino.
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Sep 7, 2021 21:31
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If its a small area you can basically do the split as you are thinking of, and then manually loft the good parts of the inner shell together to get a close to 5mm thick hull all around. Usually 2D offset methods are more robust than 3D ones and do a better job of cleaning up the self intersecting geo and not erroring out so you can then use them to build good model geometery. I've done a lot of part and mold design for complex, organic, thin walled structures and I had the best luck with treating the inner and outer surfaces as separate parts you build from related geometry. My usual workflow was to get the key surface right first (in your case the hull) then take sections, duplicate surface edges and modify, offset 2D geometery, etc to create new info to build the secondary surface to, instead of trying to directly reference one surface from the other. This also helps with getting good surface design on both parts (how the surfaces are built in software can be very important with NURBS) and avoids a lot of issues that stem from slamming automated tool buttons and hoping your part comes out right. I think spiky butthole makes a good point: you should only use automated tools if you know how they work and what they are doing, otherwise the process is a black box and you shouldn't trust what comes out - you either need to double check its what you wanted in a different software tool or otherwise confirm the output is what you expected before you go forward with it. In your case Fusion is erroring out rather than mindlessly generating bad geometry, but understanding how the 3D offset tool works helps you find the root cause of the errors. spiky butthole posted:In my experience I’ve relied on the draft analysis and lots of planning when doing dfm optimisation runs when getting moulds cut.
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Sep 7, 2021 23:50
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I'm not gonna be much help on specific techniques as I'm not a Fusion user (solidworks for solids and rhino for surfaces is what I usually use). That said, I'd look for basic surface modeling tutorials rather than anything specific - try to find an example project that involves shelling and hope they manually build the surfaces, but you'll learn a lot about how nurbs surfaces work and are constructed in any good tutorial. Lofting is just a method of building a surface from a series of guide curves, and I generally use it when I have a series of profiles I want to connect, which is pretty much what you're doing. Hadlock posted:What should I be googling for to do this. I've tried searching "manually she'll fusion 360" but not many good results. Maybe I should be searching for "lofting shell thickness" or something. Presumably I'll take each surface, copy it, adjust it X inwards, scale it down slightly, then add in a fillet to close the gap and stitch the whole monstrosity together I'm not a fusion user so I'm not 100% sure what the failure is outputting which effects my advice on approach, but generally: - i'd try to use the automated tool as much as possible, if you can chop/slice/separate the base surface until you can auto shell as much of the thing as possible - take sections of the 'bad' parts of the original surface at a regular interval - offset the sections inward to creation virtual sections of the inside of the shell - loft from the edge of one end of the good part to the other, using the virtual sections as intermediate curves - stitch the surfaces all together into one surface, have your new inner shell - turn the outer shell and the inner shell into a solid idk half the time I just start booleaning things together lol The thing with surfacing is there are a ton of ways to get to the same end state and some of it depends on what you'll use the model for, what you're comfortable with, etc etc so theres often no one way to do something. I'm also happy to review your model and maybe do a little step by step explanation of the above.
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Sep 8, 2021 03:27
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I think it's also a common mold design workflow (it's mine) to use mutibody parts to lay out the cavity and splits to create each piece, and then work on the different bodies as separate part files to add all the mold details. You end up with a weird file structure where 2 or more parts all reference the master mold assembly but it let's you make sure they have common splits etc without chasing dimensions across three files and that sorta stuff. If there are better workflows for mold design I'd be keen to learn about them (SW user here). There are also virtual parts within assemblies where you have separate parts that behave as separate parts, but they're all a single assembly file on your computer. Usually this is from top down assembly design and I usually then save out my virtual parts into real parts when I get into details and making drawings, but it's another way you can have multibody files as a semi-common occurance.
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Sep 22, 2021 00:04
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I'd look at tutorials for designing weldments, it'll be helpful for laying out a system of profiles run along a framework of lines. At least that's how weldments work in SOLIDWORKS.
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Sep 28, 2021 00:43
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On the molding book please let me know if you find something you like, I've done a fair amount of mold design but have generally winged it on the actual CAD tools side. The basic SOLIDWORKS mold making tutorial taught me the basic workflow, and anytime I couldn't design the geometry I wanted with the basic solid and surface tools it generally turned out I was trying to make dumb geometry decisions. If you understand booleans, basic surface tools for split planes, and scaling/offsets you can do 95%+ of the mold CAD creation. Most of the tricky stuff comes into designing good molds in your head, not getting it from head to computer in my experience. All the good thinking stuff I learned from working with experienced tool and die guys and I don't know if that stuff is in a book, but maybe it is. What kinds of molds are you trying to make/why do you want to learn mold design? LloydDobler posted:I've designed two houses in Solidworks and I can honestly say using 3d modeling to design architecture and framing really kinda sucks. I'm absolutely confident there are better tools out there to do it, I'm personally too lazy to look for them. I'm experienced enough with Solidworks that I make it work but when you dig in to it it's really obviously not the tool for it. Editing is a total pain in the rear end, whether it's simply moving the walls around in the floor plan or dealing with features like doorways and fixtures. Same with alternate versions of things. I think you're right that its not the ideal tool and as another poster said revit is the standard arch 3D program, but if you have to do it I'd really look at the weldments workflow, especially in SW - it lets you run pre-defined library profiles along 3D sketch members, handles most of the mitering/corner junctions, and can generate an automated cut list of all the different members. If I was gonna do a house or structure in SW, I'd do the floor plan as a 2D sketch with either defining walls via lines or lines with offsets for the wall thickness (you just want a centerline for the next step), then a 3D sketch of your framing thats driven off your floor plan so if you move a wall the framing updates, then weldments to have a 3D model of the framing, and then skin with drywall as needed. Might be able to do it as a single multi-body part file (drywall might break this) that is driven from a single floorplan sketch. I'm not an architect but some family are, and I think they work in 2D a lot and leave details up to contractors - like draw the final walls and just call out construction and finish and the contractor is the one who actually figures out the framing because its all pretty standard once you know what you're doing, the arch drawing doesnt need to having framing details for every door because the contractor knows how to do a residential door frame without being told. meowmeowmeowmeow fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Sep 28, 2021 |
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Sep 28, 2021 18:05
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That's a cool process and application, seems like a fun thing to explore. For that kind of casting I would ignore SW specific anything and go look for old books aimed at hobbyists casting things at home. I think you'll get more out of something like that which focuses on the design philosophy of poured melt casting and then go look for other tutorials on how to use specific cad methods once you hit a modeling roadblock. I think you are going to struggle to find a SOLIDWORKS focused book about that kind of mold design, I'd guess most of them are aimed at teaching people to design plastic injection molds in a machine shop or Jr mold designer context and focus a lot on how to efficiently use common mold bases, lifters, slides, ejectors, etc to quickly turn around molds for a random plastic widget.
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Sep 29, 2021 22:23
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Is there any way to align a profile in solidworks weldments at two points? I have a weldment that has different profile alignments (outside bottom vs inside top) for two different parts of the weldment and getting supports between the two required drawing new sketch geometry to get the pieces to intersect correctly. It seems like there should be a solution for this if SW lets you align profiles to sketches multiple ways but I can't figure it out.
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Oct 14, 2021 19:55
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biracial bear for uncut posted:Edit the base sketch of the weldment profile to have the point of alignment you want present. I explained it poorly, my issue is that I don't want the profile of the tube to perfectly follow my sketch line because I need it to account for the positional differences between two sets of profiles that have different profile alignment. This isn't quite my situation but I think it makes it more clear: - I have a lower rectangle that has center alignment of the profile to the sketch - I have an upper rectangle that is a different size and shifted from the bottom rectangle. I am using edge profile alignment due to design intent. - I need uprights that go from the lower to upper rectangle Because the profile alignment is different between the rectangles I cannot drive my uprights from sketch geometry that directly connects the corners of the two rectangles. If I do so and choose center profile alignment it will miss at the upper bit of the frame because of the center/edge mismatch. If I choose edge alignment, it will have the same issue. In an ideal state I would choose a different profile alignment at the different ends of the sketch line, but I do not thing this is possible. My current work around is to draw the two rectangles, make them members, then use the members as constraints to make centerline to centerline sketch lines to drive the uprights. Potentially a better work around would be to change my sketching approach. My current setup follows how I think of the design constraints, I need the bottom rectangle to fit inside a box and on top of a surface and the top rectangle to sit below a surface and fit a box inside it. The way I have it sketched I can measure my two boxes and the required separation between them and ideally have the rest populate and adjust to changes auto-magically. Maybe a better way would be to use more offsets and sketch geometery where I still drive features from my base measurements but offset planes and sketch geometry to account for my constraint to tube centerline differences, but then if I change tube dimensions I have to reset all those offsets to match my new dimensions which imo defeats the point of parametric modeling and automated tools like the weldment tool.
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Oct 16, 2021 18:52
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Yeah it's all in a 3d sketch
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Oct 17, 2021 17:59
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LloydDobler posted:One trick I've been using a ton of lately is instead of offsetting things and adding planes, is using a poo poo-ton of construction lines. If you put some along-axis constrained construction lines between other lines and points, you can set them all equal and then at least you only have one dimension to edit to change all your offsets. And if your shapes are parametric, you can even set it equal to the desired leg of your shape and it'll change with the tube size. Do you have a picture of what you're trying to accomplish? I appreciate the advice but I'm note really struggling to draft the required offsets, I just don't want to because if I have to effectively define the center axis of every member that defeats the point of half the functionality of the weldment tool imo. I'm also not sure if you can do a relation like that with the weldment tool as profiles are in a separate part file and weldment profile is selected after the sketch has been drafted, but I could do a dummy line somewhere in the sketch to define the profile size and then relate everything to that and only have to change one number instead of all of them. As far as what I'm doing, this is the base of the end result. There are some additional braces but this basic structure still has the key issue.  This is how I would like to construct the sketch, you can ignore how its dimensioned but I basically want two rectangular flat boxes connected by uprights:  This shows the crux of the problem, I would like to use different profile alignment top and bottom to match design intent. I am building this to support something a known distance from its base, the base has constraints this frame needs to fit inside and the top box needs to fit something down through the hole. The easiest way to draw it imo is to measure the size of the bottom and top constraints and use profile alignment vs offsetting everything by 1/2 profile width to get profile centerlines. You can see how the uprights now need to have different alignment at the two ends of the line to match the top and bottom rectangles:  I ended up using sketch geometry to pull effective corners from the profiles to create new lines in a separate sketch to position my uprights, which works fine but is a little sloppy and not as robust as I'd like to dimensional changes and stuff. Its all colinear or aligned to axis so its fairly robust, but has broken when playing with things:  Again, there are easy work arounds to get the profiles to line up, but it sure would be nice if the weldments tool could account for some stuff like this. If it does and I'm unaware, please let me know.
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Oct 21, 2021 01:41
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Nice job on that paintball speed loaded! Random SW question, I'm having an issue with motion in a sub assembly propagating to the main assembly. I have a hinge with a couple of configurations: open, closed, moveable. Within the hinge assembly the moveable configuration lets me drag the free part to any angle, but once my hinge assembly is in another assembly as a component it's frozen when I try to drag and move it, I get a "selected component is fully defined" error, even though there are no constraints in the top level assembly to the free leaf of the hinge. I swear I've done this exact thing before and have no idea why I'm having problems this time.
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Oct 30, 2021 22:10
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Thanks for the advice and solution, I haven't tried it yet but sounds like it'll work. I swear this flexible behavior used to be standard, I've had some pretty complex mechanism assemblies before and never had this problem but haven't used this computer and install much yet. I really don't get why solidworks flings things when you adjust mate parameters, it usually gets things in the right space the first time but man you flip the orientation of a concentric mate and it'll throw the part into the next state even though it just got it ballpark correct when you first set it up. Like getting bolts in the right spot when toolbox doesnt do it right, I'll throw in a concentric and it usually gets the head close but facing the wrong way and instead of inverting inside the bolt model space it just puts it wherever the gently caress it so chooses. I've been using a lot of reference geometry and running mates off of reference planes with distance mates and stuff in early design phases when I know big picture how I want stuff to fit but haven't drawn the connectors and brackets and stuff and then start replacing my reference mates with actual constraints based on how it'll go together, and its a pain to go and re-mate the assembly but it helps me keep things where I want as I adjust dimensions without stuff breaking but also helps me not miss lineup errors that would make the thing not assemble in real life. I wish I was a little more confident in using reference mates and references running between different parts to drive more dimensions auto-magically for things like support beams and the like but it always seems to end poorly. I also feel like I recently figured out the point of driven dimensions, they always confused the poo poo out of me but are super useful to note out a couple of key measurements that aren't how you want to define the part but are helpful as reference measurements and not having to reselect geometry for the measure tool for the sixth time in five minutes. Same with editing parts in place in an assembly, with some good section view placements its great for getting clearances and stuff right without a piece of paper of random dimensions as a reference list while tabbing between a ton of different parts.
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Nov 2, 2021 00:49
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I hadn't thought of flipping stuff to driven while you move or adjust things and then resetting them to driving, that's a good trick. I'm still on 2018 as I only really use SW for personal stuff these days, been getting back into it for some projects and realizing how much I miss the design engineer and machinist type of stuff 
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Nov 3, 2021 02:35
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Those are super cool. What are you printing on? I'd love to have a 3d printer for random projects but my limited experience with home fdm machines has turned me off of it, that looks like a resin machine?
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Nov 3, 2021 20:39
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Yeah that's cool, I hadn't realized that hobby resin printing was that low of cost these days. We have a couple of good printers at work I can run parts on at times and a friend has a full metal shop I can use whenever so ive never gotten into hobby printers but a small cheap resin printer could push me over the edge.
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Nov 3, 2021 21:49
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I'm doing some weldment design in SW and I've got a question on how you add weldnuts and stuff to the weldment. I'm doing the main frame as a multi-body part and that's all fine, no issues there. I'd like to add weldnuts and weld them in before welding tubes together, but I currently have them in the model as an assembly that's weldment + weldnuts + rivnuts. This isn't going to confuse me or anything during fabrication, but it does bug me I have components that will be welded to the frame and they aren't in my weldment file. I'd rather have them in my cut list and reflected on that drawing instead of in an assembly drawing that's half welding and half riveting, and doesn't reflect fabrication intent either.
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Nov 19, 2021 18:38
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