![]() ![]() ![]() Things like: renaming a file while keeping the reference, breaking up an in-context assembly parts to reassemble them, editing each part separately to apply a simple fillet to both of them, or going even deeper and editing sketches that drive multiple features to fix something that went wonky. ![]() Things we write manuals and methodologies around. There are other things we just accept as normal. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except that there were over 100 unique parts in the model. Yet, just this week I opened a model and somehow all references were lost. I’m going to pretend for a moment I haven’t spent 20+ years making sure my assemblies properly reference my parts. Now, let’s break these down and see how Fusion 360 approaches it differently. You know, in contrast to bottom-up modeling: Creating parts and adding them to an assembly. Here’s my definition of top-down design: Creating parts in context of an assembly. A smarty-pants, scholarly person on Wikipedia described top-down design as “breaking down of a system to gain insight into its compositional sub-systems in a reverse engineering fashion.” What-evs. I’ll cover that feature here in a moment, but it will make more sense if we have a better understanding of top-down design (or layout, skeleton, or multi-body modeling). In our first article, I mentioned five features in Fusion 360 and one of those features was As-Built Joints. Sound familiar at all? Well, this is where Fusion 360 approaches assemblies a little differently. I faced this frustration many times when just wanting to model up an idea–thinking about assembly structure when I just wanted to think about assembly design. But even before that, you consider how to build and organize the parts and assemblies? Bottom-up? Top-down? Sketch-driven? Parametric modeling is great for many, but not so friendly for conceptual modeling. If you’re a SolidWorks or Solid Edge user, you’re comfortable with building assemblies by mating components together. “Where we’re going, we don’t need mates.” ![]()
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