Breaking Down the Master File to Create Individual Part and Assembly Files for a Playground Model

In this video, we're going to start importing our master file into other part files and separating them out body by body. Now, here is our master file as it currently sits,  just showing only the unique bodies that we created, none of the patterns. The goal is to open up new part files, import this entire part file into those new part files,  and delete all the bodies except the one that is going to be featured in that particular part file.

After that, we're going to take those part files, and if you look over here to the left,  combine them into assembly files, as we can see here with all the walls and the beams. And those assembly files, those sub-assembly files rather, are going to go into a general assembly file, in other words, the totality of our playground, as you can see here on the right hand side. So let's get started now.

All right, so you should have your master file already open. The first thing we're going to do is go into File, New, and make sure that Part is selected,  and select OK. It may place you in a sketch automatically, just make sure that you close out of it with a red check mark.

Beautiful. And then the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go up to Insert right here at the top, go down to Part,  and it's already recognizing that our master file is open, and it placed it in this Open Documents box. That's convenient for us, but just in case you don't see it there,  you can click Browse, and it'll bring up your file folders, and you can search for it that way.

For right now, since it's available, we'll select what's showing. Let's go ahead and click OK. And then it immediately wants us to place this master file and all its solid bodies somewhere in space.

Now, we don't just want to place this arbitrarily. We want to place it exactly where it was made in space within its own part file. We can do that by placing arbitrarily and using mating functions the same way we did with Move, Copy Bodies to get it where it needs to be,  or we can simply just go to the green check mark and select it, and it will place it in 3D space in the same location as it is in its own file.

As you can see, this is not our master part file. If we go to the very top, it's saying Part 1 or Part 2. The bodies in here are our master part, and we can see our master part over here in the Feature Manager as its own feature brought in. But this is a completely different part file, and we're going to have to save it as its own part file.

Let's go ahead and save this. And for this, I'm going to go ahead and call it Sketch Reference Page, and I'd like you to do the same, or Sketch Reference Part, rather. There we go.

And for this, we're not going to necessarily delete all the bodies except for one. This is a special part file that we're making for ourselves. Let's go to the Feature Manager and right-click on this Master File Playground part and go to Edit Feature.

Now, it's asking us,  of all the aspects in that initial file that you imported into this part file,  what do you want to bring? Do you want to bring the solid bodies, the surface bodies, the axes,  absorbed sketches, unabsorbed sketches? In this case, make sure that we have solid bodies checked and unabsorbed sketches checked. The reason is we have a ton of unabsorbed sketches in our master file that we've been using as reference sketches for patterns and move copy body features and other things that we're going to need in our assembly files. So let's make sure that makes its way through.

All right. And for this, let's go ahead and uncheck solid bodies. There we go.

We just see the unabsorbed sketches. All right. Now, if we open this file and open sketches, we can see that maybe a few of them are hidden.

You can go ahead and reveal those as needed. Great. This is going to be this very first part, just these sketches.

The reason we're doing this is because we want to make sure that we have at least one part that just shows all our reference sketches that we can import into each of our assemblies. The alternative would be to include unabsorbed sketches in every single part that we make. The problem with that is we're trying to keep the performance on our machine as optimized as possible and having lots of lines and vertices can really bog down the performance of our machine and we don't want it to crash on us.

So all we need is just one part that has all our reference sketches and we're good to go. Once you've done this and you have this in your screen, go ahead and save it. Beautiful.

The next thing we're going to do is create a new part that features at least one of our slide bodies. Now, what we could do is go back up to file, new, part, and repeat the process all over again. But we've already done more or less the first three or four steps in that entire process, so why don't we just re-save what we have here and then just make some changes as needed.

So let's go ahead and do that. I'll do a save as command. In this case, I'm going to call this slide001.

I'm going to put an underscore between that. There we go. And let's edit what's being shown here.

We'll go to the feature manager, right click on that part,  edit feature, uncheck unabsorbed sketches, check solid bodies, and click okay. Save your work. Now we just have to delete all the bodies except one of our slide parts.

And our slide, as you know, has two parts to it. We're going to pick one. Go to delete key body and make sure that key bodies is checked.

And once you select this big slide right here. Beautiful. Now that we're here, let's go ahead and clean this up a little bit.

Let's add a fillet, maybe to these corners. Not the face. There we go.

Let's make that one inch. And let's add a fillet to this outside edge here. And why don't we make, why don't we leave that at one inch? That looks good.

Perfect. We've made that change. Let's go ahead and save it.

Now let's do the same thing but for the other slide piece. Well, again, we could open up a new part file and start the process all over again. Or we could simply just re-save this under a new name and edit the parts that need to be edited.

So let's go ahead and do that. We'll do a save as command. My hotkeys for save as are control shift S. And for this, we're going to call it slide 002.

By the way, for your parts,  if you want to go ahead and create a new file folder so that everything is neatly stored. And if you need to move other existing parts into the file folder, go ahead and do that. Just make sure that it's easy for you to access.

We'll save it here. We don't need any of these features here, so we're going to highlight them all and delete them. Beautiful.

Then we're going to go to, we're going to leave this the way that it is. Go to delete copy body. Make sure keep is checked.

Select the other slide piece right here. Beautiful. Why don't we go ahead and add fillets to this as well.

Beautiful. Those four corners and we'll do, oops, there we go. This main face here.

All right. Once that's done, save your work. All right.

Let's do this a few more times and see if we can't get the hang of it. Now, for the next one, I think we should use the shape window that we created. That's its own nice standalone piece.

Let's go ahead and resave this work. We'll do a new save as. And we'll call that window and let's go ahead and give it numeric code, 001,  even though there's only one of it.

That's perfectly fine. Just for the sake of consistency. We'll delete the fillets.

They're no longer relevant. And why don't we just go ahead and edit the body delete, keep feature. And in this case,  let's delete that second slide piece right there.

And then just keep the window. Remember to select one of the shapes, not the platform in front of it, because that's a wood piece. That's a plank.

Select one of the shapes so you can actually grab the window piece itself. There you go. And why don't we go ahead and give this some fillets as well.

These are thinner pieces, so one inch isn't showing up, but I bet half inch should show up just fine. And we can just select faces. We're doing this to add some realism to our model.

We could have done this in our master model, but there are some aspects that are more likely to change over time,  such as fillets, or maybe some aspects that are more for dressing up a part than the actual design of a part, that it's almost better to leave those features for the individual part file instead of adding more and more and more features to your master file, which can get really big and really bogged down. So it's up to you and your discernment, but this is how I like to do it. We'll go ahead and close that out.

It's already looking a lot better with those fillets. We'll save that. And next, why don't we do the pieces that make up the swing set? So I'm going to go ahead and save this under a new name.

We're going to call this Swing001, delete the fillet that is linked to this window specifically,  and we'll edit the body delete keep feature, delete that window. And there are three pieces that make up the swing set. There's four actually.

There's this eyelet, there's the chain set,  the wire holder, and the swing seat itself. So let's start with the swing seat. Beautiful.

Now, as you can see, this is only half of a seat. So let's fix that here. We'll go to mirror.

For the mirror face plane, we'll select this face right here. For the bodies to mirror, we'll select this body here. Make sure that merge solids is checked and close it out.

Let's round out these edges with a fillet. And a half inch might be a little large. And it's big enough to cover one side,  but we want something on both sides.

So let's make this 0.25. There we go. That should do it. And make sure to grab the top and bottom edges of this seat.

Perfect. That looks pretty good. Save swing001.

Now do a save as to rename it as swing002. Delete the features specific to this part or to this piece. Edit the body delete keep feature.

Delete that swing seat and grab another piece in that assembly. In this case, the wire will be great. All right.

Now, again,  this is only half of what we need. We'll do a mirror feature. Select that face.

Select the body. Make sure merge solids is checked. Close it out with a green check mark.

Save your work. Now do a save as to change the name to swing003. Delete the feature unique to this piece.

Edit the body delete feature. Delete the wire. Add both the chain links because we're going to consider this one part since it's a set.

Close it out. Save swing003. Now one last time, rename it swing004.

Edit the body delete keep feature. You can delete one by one or go to this drop down menu and click clear selections. That deletes everything at once.

And grab this eyelet. Now this is used in a couple locations. So let's go ahead and leave it swing004 for now.

But let's remember that we're going to be using this not just on the swing but also on the rope ladder as well. Since we've done that, let's save it. And that's it for this video.

In the next video,  we're going to grab all of our brackets and make parts out of those. And that's also going to require us to add whole patterns to each of our brackets as well.