You design the sketch to take advantage of that LCS. E.g. the first sketch origin should be at an assembly mating interface. It is not an entirely intuitive way to model a body but probably makes more sense if you are designing an assembly top down or in-context. I generally assemble an empty body with its LCS and then model in the body link at its location in the assembly.
Generally, no. Not if you are attaching to sketches in the bodies. Wherever you attach something there is almost always a sketch associated with it that creates the mating feature.
Correct.
Not the geometry but the actual edges and vertices in the sketch that creates the feature. Make the sketch visible before creating the LCS then you can attach it where you want with an attachment constraint mode suitable for the assembly.
At the risk of overwhelming you with too much information, I have compiled a list of brief Assembly4 “tutorials” from basic to advanced using my method of attaching LCS’s which you may find useful (or more confusing… )
Assembly4 Tutorials & Examples.pdf
There are others in woodworking similar to your model that may use different techniques. I am a machinery guy. Search the Users Showcase forum.
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These are examples of using mnesarco’s utility* to set up variables and sliders for rotation constraints in a typical ball joint. This constraint utility is something that I would like to see integrated into Assembly4 in some manner. Perhaps, a slider could pop-up when an Assembly4 variable is selected, for example. It seems that it is not too big a step from using a slider in the task bar to selecting a body in the 3D view that has a variable associated with it and dragging that body as limited by its constraint variable.
I would like to see any comments by other die-hard users of Assembly4 if they think this constraint feature may be worthwhile.
Brief comments in the image captions describe how you can use the timer variables for expressions in the Euler angles option in the Placement dialog panel for constraining a ball joint:
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ball_joint_linkage.FCStd
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Of course, you can do the same thing with the Assembly4 variables and the animator but a bit awkward when there are more than one independent variable. The Assembly4 animator also has the advantage of including a Save function for mp4’s or gifs.
The positioning arm file is too large to attach (8.37 Mb) so if you would like a copy please PM me for a temporary Dropbox link.
Available in the AddOn manager in the All list. Search for “Mnesarco Utils V0.2.2”.
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