I tend to just manually position the bodies to see if parts look like they will fit together properly. You can reduce opacity (right click a body in the tree view, appearance..., drag the slider) to see how things fit internally. Obviously this is impractical for larger projects with more parts.
I believe "Assembly4" is the most advanced assembly workbench but I've never tried it, I'd be interested in hearing from someone who has.
Re:FreeCAD on Raspberry Pi 4
by justinclift on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @07:34AM
(#22364904)
Thanks. :)
Yeah, I've tried both A2+ (A2plus) and Assembly4. Both seem to work ok for at least basic things.
However Assembly4 requires attachment points to be defined in the source parts instead of just storing the attachment info in an Assembly file.
That means source parts will have Assembly4 stuff added to them, ruining their re-use (eg with external people) unless they're also using Assembly4 exclusively.
It's really unfortunate, as I wanted FreeCAD to be useful for publishing reference designs people could use even (say) 10+ years in the future. :(
eg the Part and PartDesign workbenches seem ok, but there seems to be no stable way of assembling multiple parts together.
Instead, there seem to be several competing assembly modules, all incompatible with each other. And none of which are stable.
So, when I create a part intended to be a reference design, I can't use it in any assembly as it'll then be incompatible with every other one.
How do you do things with FreeCAD, as the above assembly problem seems like a complete blocker for any real world use? :(