Joints in Fusion 360 make no sense. How can you take something as simple as mating two components and make it so convoluted a person can't figure it out?
They've adopted a DSS type attitude of solving a problem that didn't exist, and then digging their heels in saying, "but its better, you just don't get it."
8 years later, and I still can't figure out how to mate 2 components together.
When we started Fusion, one of the areas that we decided to try to improve over more traditional CAD software was the area of assembly modeling. Customers new to CAD often struggle with such abstract and mathematical concepts as "flush" and "mate" for describing relationships (especially kinematic relationships) between components. So, we decided to try to elevate the concept a bit to terms that are more familiar to mechanical designers: Joints. In our thinking, a "revolute joint" was more obvious than "Mate" between two linear entities that just happened to result in a circular degree of freedom. So, we decided to go "all in" on the joints approach, and not offer traditional assembly constraints at all. It was a bit of a risk. To our knowledge, no CAD software had tried this joints-only approach to assembly modeling.
In our (admittedly biased) opinion, this works very well for describing kinematic relationships. It seems pretty easy to created jointed component relationships. Especially in a top/down workflow, with "As Built Joint", I find it really easy to create most common mechanisms.
In the interest of honesty, where this approach still requires some tuning is in trying to position components rigidly with respect to each other. Fusion has always had Rigid joints, which definitely solves part of this workflow. But the joint positioning choices didn't always result in exactly the correct relative positioning of components relative to each other. So, over time we have added a few commands that help. One is Rigid Group. This command allows you to select a set of components and make them rigid with respect to each other in ther current positions. The Align command allows you to position components with respect to each other, by aligning geometry, and Move allows you to do more freeform moving of components. So, a very useful workflow is to use Align or Move to position components, then put them into a Rigid Group.
The other workflow is one that works well with top/down design. If you create components in a top/down design manner (for example, one sketch that is used to create 3 components), and you build these components in the orientation with each other that you want, then a simple As Built Joint with a type of Rigid works very well.
We are always looking for ways to improve workflows in Fusion. If you have ideas in this area, please let us know.
Jeff Strater (Fusion development)
Jeff Strater
Software Architect - Fusion 360
