Constraints and Solvers

Assembly3 supports multiple constraint solver backend. The user can choose different solver for each Assembly. The type of constraints available may be different for each solver. At the time of this writing, two backend are supported, one based on the solver from SolveSpace, while the other uses SymPy and SciPy, and is modeled after SolveSpace. In other word, the current two available solvers supports practically the same set of constraints and should have very similar behavior, except some difference in performance.

Assembly3 exposed most of SolveSpace's constraints. In addition, it also provides several new constraints that are more useful for assembly purposes. Most of these constraints are in fact composite of the original constraints from SolveSpace. All of the constraints are available as toolbar buttons, but only the more common ones are visible by default. To reveal all the constraints, click . See the section below for links to details of each individual constraint.

Creating Constraint

Creating constraint is easy. Simply create an assembly by clicking , drag in the parts, select some geometry elements of the parts in 3D view, and click one of the constraint buttons to create the constraint. The constraining elements will appear as child objects under the constraint object. By default, auto element visibility function is active, which will hide the constraining element, and auto reveal itself when being selected, either directly, or when its parent constraint is selected. You can deactivate this function by clicking , and control the element visibility manually as shown in the following screen cast.

When you create an assembly, it is advisable to first choose a base part, which is supposed to have a fixed placement relative to its containing assembly. You do this by creating a Lock constraint , as shown in the above screen cast. You can still move the locked part, either using various Mover tools (, , ), or directly modify the part's Placement property. The Lock constraint only prevent the assembly solver from changing the part's location. If you moved a locked part, every other part will gather around the new location of the locked part, after solver recompute. If you don't want to accidentally activate the mover for locked parts, click .

Each Constraint object has a Type property, which allows the user to change the type of an existing constraint using the property editor. Not all constraints require the same types of geometry elements, which means that changing the type may invalidate a constraint. The tree view will mark those invalid constraints with a red exclamation mark. Hover the mouse over those invalid items to see the explanation. You can reorder the elements using and buttons. You change an existing constraining element by selecting a new face or edge in the 3D view and drag the corresponding tree item and drop it over the element item.

Constraining Geometry Element

Assembly3 is very flexible about the interpretation of a constraining geometry element. When a constraint is named as PointOnLine, it does not mean the constraint only accepts vertex and linear edge. Here is a list of alternative interpretations of an element,

• Point
  • Coordinate of a vertex;
  • Middle point of a linear edge;
  • Center of a circular edge;
  • Center of bounding box of any other edge;
  • Center of bounding box of a planar face;
  • Center of a circular face;
  • Center of the first edge (i.e. Edge1) of a cylindrical face.
• Line, (of which only the direction is relevant for constraining, not the end points)
  • Linear edge;
  • The normal vector of the surface of a circular edge;
  • The normal vector of the surface of a planar face;
  • The revolving axis of a cylindrical face.
• Plane, defined by an origin point interpreted the same way as the above Point, and a normal vector
  • The surface of a circular edge;
  • The surface of the first edge (i.e. Edge1) of a cylindrical face;
  • The surface of a planar face.

One thing that a serious user may find worth getting familiar with is the Element concept in Assembly3. The elements used by various constraints never reference the actual part object directly, but instead, through an intermediate object stored in the ElementGroup. If the geometry belongs to some model in a sub-assembly, then the Element object is stored in the ElementGroup of that sub-assembly instead of the parent's. You can consider the Elements as a declaration of geometry interfaces that this part (as a sub-assembly) can be constrained in higher level assemblies. Many advanced feature is made possible through this extra indirection, such as part replacement.

As shown in the previous section, you can create constraint by simply selecting a face or edge of the part model. What is happening behind the scene is that the program will find the sub-assembly that owns the selected part geometry model, and create an Element object in its ElementGroup if there isn't one existing, and finally create an ElementLink referencing the Element, and put it under the new constraint. Instead of directly selecting geometry elements of the model in 3D view, you can also select any existing ElementLink or Element in the tree view to create new constraints, which is in fact the preferable way to do, as illustrated in this tutorial.

If you are constraining a part object directly without using any sub-assembly, then the Element will be stored directly in the current assembly. This is allowed for quick testing of simple assemblies, and also to make it easy for beginners to get started. For complex real world assemblies, it is strongly recommended to wrap each part object inside an assembly before further assembling, so that each geometry reference to the part model can be grouped together for easy updating through drag and drop. See, again, this tutorial for more tips of handling complex assemblies.

Geometry Element Offset

Each ElementLink has an Offset property to allow you to apply some transformation to the element before constraining. The offset is always in the geometry element's coordinate space. For example, for a planar face, the z axis of the offset placement is always pointing to the normal of the face. Because ElementLink is used by one and only one Constraint, its offset does not affect other constraints. The Element object also has an Offset property with the same purpose. However, because the Element may be referenced by multiple ElementLink, changing the offset may affect multiple constraints. This is useful, for example, to introduce some allowance between parts when assembling.

The following screen cast shows the usage of element Offset, and highlights the difference between applying offset on ElementLink and Element.

Starting from version 0.11, there is a few new context menu actions to simplify manipulating element offset. Simply right click any Element or ElementLink item in the tree view to bring up the context menu, available actions are,

• Flip element: Flip the Z normal of the element by rotation 180 degrees along its X axis. If CTRL key is pressed while activate this action, it will rotate along the element's Y axis. Note that Flip element is most effective when used in Attachment constraint, because the constraint follows the element's Z normal unambiguously. For other type of constraint, like PlaneConcidence or PlaneAlignment, you may want to try the Flip part menu action, because these types of constraint works the same regardless of the element Z normal orientation, so flipping the element will have no effect.

• Offset element, use the dragger (similar to Mover tool) to manipulate element offset directly in the 3D view.

• Reset offset, reset element to no offset.

Constraints with More Than Two Elements

It is intuitive for one to select two geometry elements and create a constraint. However, in Assembly3, there are many constraints that can accept more than two elements.

On the constraint toolbar, when you see an icon with a red dashed border like , it means the constraint accepts a third optional element as a projection plane to project the first two elements into 2D space. Although 2D constraints are more useful when creating skeleton-sketch, you may find it effective when dealing with the redundant constraint problem, as a way to reduce the number of DOF constrained.

For icons with a red border like , it means this is a 2D only constraint, and the third projection plane element is mandatory.

For icon with a green border like , it means the constraint accepts multiple elements of the same type (with a few exceptions). The solver will expand the constraint as follow,

Constraint
    | -- ElementLink1
    | -- ElementLink2
    | -- ElementLink3
    | -- ElementLink4

will be expand to

Constraint1
    | -- ElementLink1
    | -- ElementLink2

Constraint2
    | -- ElementLink3
    | -- ElementLink2

Constraint3
    | -- ElementLink4
    | -- ElementLink2

For icons with a blue border like , it supports the same multiple elements like those with green boarder. In addition, the constraint has a Cascade property, and when set to True, it will expand the constraints as follow,

Constraint
    | -- ElementLink1
    | -- ElementLink2
    | -- ElementLink3
    | -- ElementLink4

will be expand to

Constraint1
    | -- ElementLink1
    | -- ElementLink2

Constraint2
    | -- ElementLink2
    | -- ElementLink3

Constraint3
    | -- ElementLink3
    | -- ElementLink4

Constraint2 and onwards will be automatically skipped if their elements belong to the same part. See the following screen cast for an example, which also shows the effect of applying other parameters of a constraint when cascading is activated.

Constraint Multiplication

There are some multi-element capable constraints that support another advanced mode, called constraint multiplication, which uses Link Array to multiply the part of the first element to be constrained against the rest of the elements. At the time of this writing, only PlaneConicdent and AxialAlignment support this. You can activate this functionality by selecting a supporting constraint object in the tree view and then click . There is one additional requirement. In order to activate that button. The owner part of the first constraining element must be the first instance of a Link Array.

If the second constraining element and onwards is a circular edge, it will be automatically expanded to include all coplanar circular edges of the same radius. The following screen cast shows the default behavior of constraint multiplication,

Notice that the first step shown in the above screen cast is to replace a directly added part object with a link, and then change it to an array by setting the ElementCount property. If you drag an object from an external document and drop it in an assembly container, a link will be created automatically, so you don't need this replace with a link step. The screen cast also shows that you can add more constraining element by drag and drop. And the new element will be expanded, too. You can disable element auto expansion, by changing the NoExpand property as shown in the following screen cast. If the last added element has NoExpand set to True, any new elements added afterwards will not be expanded either. This allows you to choose exactly which elements to multiply. You can also manually control the total number of instances of the first part array, by turning off the AutoCount property of the first element.

One disadvantage of multiplying a constraint this way is that you are forced to use the same set of parameters for all part instances. If you want to have different parameters, say, a different offset for each screw instance, you can select the multiplied constraint, and click again . This time, the constraint will be expanded into multiple independent constraint objects equivalent to the multiplied constraint for easy customization.

List of Constraints

• Lock
• Plane Alignment
• Plane Coincident
• Axial Alignment
• Same Orientation
• Multi Parallel
• Angle and Perpendicular
• Points Coincident
• Points in Plane
• Points on Circle
• Points Distance
• Points Plane Distance
• Point Line Distance
• Symmetric

Implementation

Assembly3 exposed most of SolveSpace's constraints. If you want to know more about the internals, please read this document from SolveSpace first. The way Assembly3 uses the solver is that, for a given Assembly,

• Create free parameters corresponding to the placement of each movable child feature, that is, three parameters for position, and four parameters for its orientation (quaternion).
• For each constraint, create SolveSpace Entities (i.e. points, normals, rotations, etc) for each geometry element as a transformation of its owner feature's placement parameters.
• Create SolveSpace Constraints with the Entities created in the previous step.
• Ask SolveSpace to solve the constraints. SolveSpace formulate the constraint problems as a non-linear least square minimization problem, generates equations symbolically, and then tries to numerically find a solution for the free parameters.
• The child features placements are then updated with the found solution.

For nested assemblies, Assembly3 will always solve all the child assemblies first before the parent.

One thing to take note is that, SolveSpace is a numerical solver, which means it is sensitive to initial conditions. In other word, you must first roughly align two features according to their constraints, or else the solver may not be able to find an answer. Assembly3 has extensive support of easy manual placement of child feature. See the following section for more details.