Nice video, this series has been really helpful for me. What is the benefit of creating the Skeleton model in a different file? Could you make the planes in the 'Arm' file and not have to deal with all the binders?
So glad you found this useful! Is there anything that you would like to see in future videos? I'm about to release another one on robust part modeling and keyboard shortcus, and working on one about the pipe tool. You are right, I could have created the "master" sketches inside the "Arm" part and then dealing with binders in the other part. However I found over the years that it's much better to have all shared features in an external skeleton. In a year from now I will definitely forget which part is driving the geometry, but if I consistently use a "skeleton" part then there's no ambiguity. The skeleton then carries the design intent and acts as a single entry point for modifications. (in fact I have already forgotten how I modelled this, and it's only been 2 weeks! 😁)
@@engineeringmaths That makes sense, thanks. I'll try this next time I need to create a multi-part design. I think the shortcut video sounds the most helpful for me right now. I feel like I can do a lot in Free CAD with my limited knowledge, but I'm sure there are much faster and easier ways of doing it. Anything that makes the workflow more efficient would be awesome.
I was thrilled to find your video on top-down design in FreeCad. I am retired and recently have been working on some hobbyist designs after doing years of mechanical cad design in industry. Just starting to learn FreeCad. I became a proponent of top-down design years ago (in both ProE and Inventor) when I discovered how much faster it is with the TDD process to make dimensional changes in an assembly that might affect hundreds of parts, and possibly hundreds of associated parts drawings. I also made it a practice to include kinematics geometry in the same top level skeleton, to allow for animation and simulation analysis of the assembly. I will be interested to see if FreeCad also includes that possibility, but learning how to make it work for a set of parts will be a great start for me in my very simple hobbyist designs. Thanks again for sharing this brilliant video!
Your videos are incredible. The best videos in computing applied to engineering. With your computer 🖥 knowledge, one can finish a master degree in less than a year
As someone with a programming background this workflow feels natural to me because it allows properties to be propagated independently to many parts. However I always seem to keep running into issues when updating the master sketches. I am aware of the topological naming problem in freecad so obviously creating new edges or deleting edges from master sketches is bound to have issues in parts that reference geometry in the master sketches. What's not so obvious to me is that just modifying the constraints values (for instance changing the diameter of a circle just slightly) can also break references for some reason. There is no way to manually name the edges so I guess this will always be a problem? Updating external geometry references in sketches is also extremely difficult since you have to delete the references and re-add them which makes you lose all of your constraints... How do you cope with this?
Thank you for your amazing explanation on top-down design. I started on working on a written tutorial based on your video. Unfortunatelly I wasn't able to send you my donation, since it's not possible to pay via PayPal.
This is very helpful, thank you. I see you're separating the bodies into separate files, with one body per file. In general, would you avoid having multiple bodies in a file? Part Design has the yellow "Part" container, but I've never really understood the best way to organise these things
I would recommend creating a STd_part_container, the yellow kind and the add bodies to it, ie. a part container could contain a screw body, spacer body, washer body and a nut body in one file. Then you could reuse that part container along with others in another file to build up an assembly in another part container
Thank you, i learned somethings from your workflow. With A4 assembly, my workflow is a little bit different. The components are not only getting the geometry informations from skel but also its placement in assembly.
Great Tutorial! Also checked your videos on FEA simulations, have you ever tried automating this type of assembly change and recomputing from a python script?
The shape binder approach seems robust, but given you have to sketch over it, how does it work when the sketch geometry is more complicated than a square, or if the geometry changes?
It's difficult to be robust to sketch geometry changes in general unfortunately (have been working with Solidworks recently and the tree will break easily in it too if your sketch geometry changes significantly)
Nice video, this series has been really helpful for me.
What is the benefit of creating the Skeleton model in a different file? Could you make the planes in the 'Arm' file and not have to deal with all the binders?
So glad you found this useful! Is there anything that you would like to see in future videos? I'm about to release another one on robust part modeling and keyboard shortcus, and working on one about the pipe tool.
You are right, I could have created the "master" sketches inside the "Arm" part and then dealing with binders in the other part. However I found over the years that it's much better to have all shared features in an external skeleton.
In a year from now I will definitely forget which part is driving the geometry, but if I consistently use a "skeleton" part then there's no ambiguity. The skeleton then carries the design intent and acts as a single entry point for modifications.
(in fact I have already forgotten how I modelled this, and it's only been 2 weeks! 😁)
@@engineeringmaths That makes sense, thanks. I'll try this next time I need to create a multi-part design.
I think the shortcut video sounds the most helpful for me right now. I feel like I can do a lot in Free CAD with my limited knowledge, but I'm sure there are much faster and easier ways of doing it. Anything that makes the workflow more efficient would be awesome.
Thank you for making this video, it saved me so much time in troubleshooting and learning. I hope you keep making videos like these!
Nice work explaining this. I've been using CAD for many years and top down design has always been hard to achieve in FreeCAD compared to others.
I was thrilled to find your video on top-down design in FreeCad. I am retired and recently have been working on some hobbyist designs after doing years of mechanical cad design in industry. Just starting to learn FreeCad. I became a proponent of top-down design years ago (in both ProE and Inventor) when I discovered how much faster it is with the TDD process to make dimensional changes in an assembly that might affect hundreds of parts, and possibly hundreds of associated parts drawings.
I also made it a practice to include kinematics geometry in the same top level skeleton, to allow for animation and simulation analysis of the assembly. I will be interested to see if FreeCad also includes that possibility, but learning how to make it work for a set of parts will be a great start for me in my very simple hobbyist designs.
Thanks again for sharing this brilliant video!
Great to hear it helped! Pro-E user as well, it's an uphill battle but the reward of top-down are huge once you start changing things.
Your videos are incredible.
The best videos in computing applied to engineering.
With your computer 🖥 knowledge, one can finish a master degree in less than a year
Thank you for taking the time to make this useful tutorial.
Thank you for the informative videos! Would you be interested in revisiting this subject with the recent releases of FreeCAD?
Hi, very impressive mastery of freecad ! Thanks. Going to next level for me !
As someone with a programming background this workflow feels natural to me because it allows properties to be propagated independently to many parts. However I always seem to keep running into issues when updating the master sketches.
I am aware of the topological naming problem in freecad so obviously creating new edges or deleting edges from master sketches is bound to have issues in parts that reference geometry in the master sketches. What's not so obvious to me is that just modifying the constraints values (for instance changing the diameter of a circle just slightly) can also break references for some reason. There is no way to manually name the edges so I guess this will always be a problem? Updating external geometry references in sketches is also extremely difficult since you have to delete the references and re-add them which makes you lose all of your constraints... How do you cope with this?
Thank you for your amazing explanation on top-down design. I started on working on a written tutorial based on your video. Unfortunatelly I wasn't able to send you my donation, since it's not possible to pay via PayPal.
Hey no worries! Glad you found it useful either way, the channel is not eligible for donations yet but appreciate the thought!
This is very interesting and confusing to my new-to-cad brain, but I'll give it a go later.
This is very helpful, thank you.
I see you're separating the bodies into separate files, with one body per file. In general, would you avoid having multiple bodies in a file? Part Design has the yellow "Part" container, but I've never really understood the best way to organise these things
I would recommend creating a STd_part_container, the yellow kind and the add bodies to it, ie. a part container could contain a screw body, spacer body, washer body and a nut body in one file. Then you could reuse that part container along with others in another file to build up an assembly in another part container
Thank you, i learned somethings from your workflow. With A4 assembly, my workflow is a little bit different. The components are not only getting the geometry informations from skel but also its placement in assembly.
Assembly from skeleton sounds like a great workflow idea. Thanks for the tip!
Great Tutorial! Also checked your videos on FEA simulations, have you ever tried automating this type of assembly change and recomputing from a python script?
Haven't tried this but it seems like it could be a great approach for designing multiple variants of the same part / assembly
Thank you for your video! It was very helpful for me. :)
The shape binder approach seems robust, but given you have to sketch over it, how does it work when the sketch geometry is more complicated than a square, or if the geometry changes?
It's difficult to be robust to sketch geometry changes in general unfortunately (have been working with Solidworks recently and the tree will break easily in it too if your sketch geometry changes significantly)