CAD?

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

Don't use project/convert geometry from an assembly into a part. It's great and fast when it works the first time but when you iterate and change designs it will be a minefield of broken references that will take for ever to fix.

Honestly, this ties into the "constrain everything" practice, and while I agree it's an ideal to strive towards, it's not always feasible.

Certainly, any sketch you construct from scratch should be fully constrained, but there comes a point (complex mounting patterns transferred from .STEP files that you had to get from the internet, for example) where constraining everything will do nothing but give you a headache. Any time you need to incorporate geometry that you yourself did not actually design, you're going to run into this. It seems clear to me that the best solution is not to re-create all of the geometry from scratch.

Fortunately, those aren't things that you tend to make iterative changes to, as they're not something that you are actually designing, so you're not going to lose much by being "sloppy" there.