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9 posts tagged with "assembly"

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· 9 min read
Brad Collette
Alexandre Prokoudine

The basics of an integrated assembly workbench in FreeCAD are now functional and will be ready for wider testing once another pull request is merged. This means you can play with it now in the development version of FreeCAD and when version 1.0 is out, you will be able to create or link parts, create joints between them, and solve the assembly — in just a few clicks, out of the box, without installing any add-ons.

· 11 min read
Brad Collette
Alexandre Prokoudine

We started this series with the assumption that there is a strong community demand for a default assembly workbench in FreeCAD. The community discussion that followed that article confirmed our belief. We then researched existing options — Assembly 2, A2plus, Assembly 3, and Assembly 4 — and even quickly studied related workbenches and macros.

Our research had a number of limitations though. We avoided exploring the earliest solutions such as the original workbench by Jürgen Riegel and FreeGCS because they were incomplete. We also decided against studying both Exploded Assembly and Animation workbenches because this type of feature deserves dedicated attention.

· 8 min read
Brad Collette
Alexandre Prokoudine

In the previous posts in this series we’ve already discussed reasons to create a default assembly workbench and then explored existing options: Assembly 2, A2plus, Assembly 3, and Assembly 4.

There are several more tools that provide a subset of their features, and these tools regularly come up in discussions on creating assemblies: the BodyBuilder macro, the Manipulator workbench, and the Part-o-magic workbench. Since none of them can realistically serve as a foundation for a potential default assembly workbench, in this review, we’ll focus on their interaction models to see what we can learn from them.