I’ll second the post about constraining everything.
All sketches to be fully dimensioned or constrained –nothing left to float.
All assemblies – nail your first component down so it is fixed. Constrain all other components – for me, most of the time, I constrain components together how they will go together in real life – surfaces and fixing holes – if anyone then moves the holes etc, then the assembly shows a fault. Others will constrain to the main assembly co-ord system – but if you change anything in the components, you have to go change those constraints, or at least make sure they still work.
Simply moving components into place and not constraining them usually does exactly what you are experiencing – they just float around wherever they want. If there’s a degree of freedom, then somewhere along the line, it will move. The only thing I don’t tend to bother fixing in all 3 planes are round washers as it doesn’t matter if they can rotate.
Given everything is now fixed in place, I’ve never then had an issue converting from the native CAD to step, stl, Parasolid etc – all the components are now simply bodies in the right place. In those conversion files, nothing is constrained, but you then shouldn’t be working with the conversion files if you have the native CAD files.
It’s sometimes time consuming, a pain in the bum, but as you are discovering, not doing so is even more so.
All sketches to be fully dimensioned or constrained –nothing left to float.
All assemblies – nail your first component down so it is fixed. Constrain all other components – for me, most of the time, I constrain components together how they will go together in real life – surfaces and fixing holes – if anyone then moves the holes etc, then the assembly shows a fault. Others will constrain to the main assembly co-ord system – but if you change anything in the components, you have to go change those constraints, or at least make sure they still work.
Simply moving components into place and not constraining them usually does exactly what you are experiencing – they just float around wherever they want. If there’s a degree of freedom, then somewhere along the line, it will move. The only thing I don’t tend to bother fixing in all 3 planes are round washers as it doesn’t matter if they can rotate.
Given everything is now fixed in place, I’ve never then had an issue converting from the native CAD to step, stl, Parasolid etc – all the components are now simply bodies in the right place. In those conversion files, nothing is constrained, but you then shouldn’t be working with the conversion files if you have the native CAD files.
It’s sometimes time consuming, a pain in the bum, but as you are discovering, not doing so is even more so.
