Whats New in Fusion May 2024 | Ground To Parent | Insert Component

In this follow up video we are going to dive into this new feature Ground to Parent for Fusion Assemblies and shed some light on how it works and what problems you may encounter.
In theory this is a great tool, but in practice it needs a little more development time. We will go over a few examples and find out how.
The rotary engine shown in this video is part of our Absolute Beginners Guide to Assemblies on our site. This course is $10 or you can bundle all the beginner content for $35. If you are just getting started in Fusion and need some foundational content be sure to check it out.
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[@David_Best]

You are right that this is pretty obscure and illusive to figure out use cases. It's not at all obvious to me when ground to parent is going to be helpful, but it is clear that it will get in my way a lot of the time if I leave it as the default condition. So I'm going to turn it off in preferences and maybe - just maybe - it will be come obvious in the future with a "slap to the head - I could have used a ground to parent" reaction.

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

Couldn't have said it better :)

[@benmo2227]

Agreed. But i kinda like having those things in my timeline. It helps with troubleshooting.

[@JeffBradway]

I have 20 years of experience with a combination of NX and SolidWorks and consider myself and expert in both tools. I love a lot of things about Fusion, but component mating and positioning still seems EXTREMELY DIFFICULT. Can you recommend any best practices for positioning components in an assembly that will encounter many design changes at many levels?

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

Hey Jeff. I too have used NX(4 and 5 many years ago), been a CSWE since 2009, and still use SWx, Inventor, and of course Fusion. I understand the struggle :) Sadly i did an entire series for Autodesk's youtube channel for users coming from SWx to fusion and all the differences but i don't think it ever went up. would have been perfect. I know they have several playlists for users coming from Solidworks but most of them are old and don't really compare the topics in depth (can't show solidworks). Maybe i need to do a series on my channel. But to your question there are key differences in the way the constraint system works in Solidworks vs in Fusion. I personally prefer Fusions method. Solidworks - You slowly take away degrees of freedom while positioning parts in an assembly. So you need to dictate lets say the center location of a pin in a hole, then you need to define its height relative to the hole, and maybe lock its rotation. There are some joints that do multiple things at once and introduce limits but in general the idea of restricting degrees of freedom is key. Fusion - In fusion you add a joint that defines the component position and degrees of freedom. Generally a single joint is used. For example Revolute will allow you to position a bearing on a shaft at a specific location and allow it to rotate. The As-built joint makes use of the current location of a component so no extra selection is needed. a "Joint" requires you to pick the location on each component as well as the motion type. The good news is that with Fusion the joints are timeline based, unlike in Solidworks, this means you can add a joint to a cylindrical face and later decide to chamfer an edge and not break the joint. Fusion keeps track of the coordinate system of each component so it doesn't really even care about the geometry (in most cases). I did a small series on kinematics with Fusion where we made suspension geometry and showed you don't even need geometry in a component to apply a joint. With 20 years in the game you know there are nuanced differences but those are the key points.

[@ryancousins]

Okay, really silly question... How are you moving around the components without invoking the Move/Copy dialog box and the arrows and rotation glyphs that appear over the object typically when moving it?

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

if a component is not grounded to parent or pinned (or has some other joint like a rigid joint) you can just grab with a left click and move it around. Fusion tracks the location of the coordinate system so you either need to capture the position or revert before doing anything else.

[@ryancousins]

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign Thanks!

[@emanggitulah4319]

Thanks a lot Matt. Really appreciate you looking deeper into that topic. I think I will also turn off the automatic creation of the ground to parent feature for now and will use it more selective. My workflow was to either ground the first component or use a joint (like you demonstrated). Btw when I used the rigid group and I what to modify any position I move the time line just before that rigid group feature. Great explanation! The explanation from autodesk was not that clear and I thought it will work way different.

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

Glad it helped :) Your question gave me the push i needed to make a video on it. Not sure how much clearer it is now than before :)

[@javierrodriguezrodriguez5435]

Thank you Matt, there is any course on the fusion website about these new features that provide more in depth knowledge from the beginning? I’m a naïve assembly user. Thanks

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

You are welcome! Since these features are new there is not any content I am aware of officially by Autodesk other than the little clips you see on their blog post. I do have an assemblies course on my site for absolute beginners to better understand how they work, but with Fusion there are a lot of different options so it can be very hard to understand until you have a lot of practice. www.learneverythingaboutdesign.com/

[@mvred100]

very good overview. Thank you!

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

Welcome!

[@bwilliams1815]

I like it. Thanks Matt. Yesterday I worked on an assembly file from Creo to Fusion. Fusion asked for the main part upon importing. The problem for me was that the parts came in as bodies and not components. I could not use joints or as built joints as theynwere bodies. Also the assembly constrains disappeared once I derived two of the parts to work on just drawings for those parts. I had to do many move commands to get the relationships back together. I wonder if this new relationship would have helped in my issue? Thanks again for the explanation.

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

If they came in as bodies it would not have. Usually the best thing to do on imported files like that is to turn off the history, convert all the bodies to components, then turn the history back on. Once they are components at the top/start of your assembly (assuming they are still in the right place), you can start to apply those as-built joints.

[@Paulklampeeps]

What happened to the normal ground?

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

They renamed it Pin.. .. Same thing just got a rename, why? I have no clue.

[@raffaelebrivio7782]

@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign thanks, this comment saved my day

[@kalicacao]

Thanks for the explanation. I'm very enthustiastic with this new feature. I mostly do static assemblies where there are no or very few moving components. Ground to parent makes things much easier as there is no need to manage dozens of "as build" joints, rigid grups of pinned components in the timeline. This becomes especially frustrating when I work on a large assembly over the course of weeks and more componets are being added consequently. In the end I get a lot of joint features scattered along the timeline that are super annoying to analyze and troubleshoot. With this new feature all those joints are time-independent and can be easily managed. This is truly a breaktrough feature for me.

[@LearnEverythingAboutDesign]

That is good to hear! With your static assemblies, are there downstream drawings or a good reason do to components vs bodies? Timeline management maybe? With components you never have to pin/ground them. Fusion will always track them so as long as you don't capture position they can be fixed in space without those things.

[@kalicacao]

​@@LearnEverythingAboutDesign You're right, with single design file with static parts there is no need to use any joints at all. The problem starts when this later becomes a subassembly in another design. With larger projects I usually try to split them into multiple subassemblies and then everything needs to be properly constrained. Using multibody approach sometimes works too, but becomes problematic when there is a need to make a BOM files and drawings. This new feature makes things much easier and straightforward.