Modeling: Add Formations to UI (Done in OSDM 2006)

[Michael Kahle]

Formations should be added to UI and maybe functionality should be added. Any suggestions are welcome.

[Jim McKim]

One of the major uses of formations is for creating exploded assemblies. The lack of ease of creating exploded drawings in OSD/Annotation is a MAJOR weakness of the product. It should be built in and easy to use. I investigated formations but abandoned the idea because of the hidden nature of them. From what I saw, another user can not tell that formations exists for a model, and the drawing of the model depends on which formation is "active" when the drawing is updated. Both of these need to be fixed for formations to be fully useful. Formations should appear in the structure browser, and a drawing should belong to a formation, which is basically what we have arrived at in our efforts to make up for the lack of an exploded view function in OSD by making an exploded assembly with shared parts and making a drawing whos owner is that assembly. It is this kind of work-around that should be eliminated by a good implementation of formations.

[Michael Kahle]

Jim, have you ever load the goodie "am_form"?
With this it is possible to assign a formation to a view.
Therefore the formation has to be defined on the same owner as the viewset. If it is not, you may copy the formation there.

We recommend not to change the application (or save models) with formations active.

[pkehoe]

Formations definitely need to be made more visible. They should
be shown like features on an assembly. And the commands need
to be made more visible, too (not a "goody"). I would suggest
having it be an application (like 3D Documentation).

Fundamentally, Formations are useful for documentation. One
form of documentation is the 2D drawing. But there are other
ways to document an assembly as well. One other way would
be to create an animation showing how the assembly gets
put together, or an animation of how it works.

Being able to leave an assembly in a formation other than the
default would be useful. Also, if the assembly is shared, it would
be nice to be able to have one assembly in one formation while
the other is in a different formation.

Another suggestion would be to show (like with a 3D curve)
the path taken by the parts as they are moved from the
assembled formation to the exploded formation.

Some automated (or semi-automated) and intelligent tools for
exploding parts would be useful. For example, if there is a pin
in a hole, it should be smart enough to explode the screw
straight out of the hole.

[gmatelich]

Being able to transfer formations to other assemblies would be nice as well. I built an exploded view of a complex assembly, but about half way through, decided it would make more sense attached to the parent of that assembly. Now I believe I'm only left with the option of re-exploding the assembly.

[fox-myers]

Originally posted by gmatelich
Being able to transfer formations to other assemblies would be nice as well.

This currently can be addressed with copy formation. Check out the other thread (http://www.cocreateusers.org/forum/showthread.php?s=&postid=676#post676) for more information. It definitely would be nice if there was a way to copy the formation that ensured that the global position of a part was maintained and not its position relative to the owning assembly.

[Michael Kahle]

http://www.cocreateusers.org/forum/showthread.php?threadid=2123

[Greg Gonzales]

It is actually nice that you can choose to attach the formation attributes to either the Instance, or the Contents of the Assy. This allows you to register different formations to shared assys. However, the current version of the module does not gracefully handle changing this attachment. If you start out with an instance attachment, then you cannot change later; and worse, if you try you will get very unexpected results.

The fully supported version needs to clean this area up. There also needs to be a configurable or at least logical sorting of the formations list. Right now it is random and if you have a lot of formations attached you can't easily find them.