Explode your family! Simplifying Family Creation

We recently ran into an interesting issue. We were working on a data enclosure cabinet and we wanted to have multiple side panels, tops, and door configurations without having nested families as we all know nested families bloat your file sizes. This particular cabinet had 4 different doors to choose from. The challenge was how to do you build the multiple doors when they are aligned directly on top of each other. You could build them one at a time then move them to their final location…right? Sure, but what happens when you need to go back and make a change to any of the doors, you're in trouble!

FAMILY VIEW	PROJECT VIEW

 

We decided to steal an idea from inventor, exploded views! We wanted to have the option to move the doors away from each other so that we can edit them easily, but also have the option to quickly collapse them into their final shared location. Here are the tips we used to accomplish this:

1. Create 2 Boolean parameters called "z Collapse" & "z Distance"

1. Create a reference line for each door
2. Space each reference line 18" apart from each other
3. Dimension each reference line to each other and select the parameter "z Distance" from dropdown list.

   

4. Create a section and drag its field of depth so you only see the first door extrusion

   

    

   You are now ready to create your door extrusion and set its constraints. After you have completed a door you can either repeat step 5 and create a separate section for each door, or you can just simply move your section down to the next one and create the next door. Once you have created all the geometry you need simply go into your parameters and click the "z Collapse" Boolean and hit apply. The doors will now collapse down to the same common XYZ location.

    

   Heres what our family ended up looking like EXPLODED!

   

    

   It's important to note that we do not allow the user to use this function in the project; it is locked out by magic... We don't want any exploded families inside a project! Even though this would be a great way to freak out a co-worker!

    

   This can be very useful for many different family geometry applications. Try it out, see what you can come up with and leave us a comment below!

    

   Happy Modeling!