Thinking about assemblies in a project with cabinet design software

Assemblies are the building blocks of your project.  You must have one and can have as many as you like.  You’ll get a feel for the right number of assemblies in any given project with some experience with SketchList 3D.

Assemblies are time savers.  They have the advantage of holding many components together in one unit.  Assemblies hold boards, doors, drawers, and hardware.

You can move all the objects in an assembly simply by moving the assembly: or cloning it, or rotating it, or stretching or shrinking it, or cloning and mirroring the assembly as one unit.  It save alot of time if, for example, you design one side of a wall unit, and simply clone and move it to the other side.

Assemblies can be added or deleted, have their size changed, and moved around at any time.

Assemblies can even be merged into one another.  Very useful for work like creating a leg as two board in an assembly, clone and rotate the assembly, merge the two assemblies into one — then clone and roate that assembly 180 degrees to make up the other two legs.   Merge these two sets of two legs and = presto – you have four legs – with two boards each!  It’s faster to do than to write about.

Three rules apply.

1. An assembly cannot be bigger than the project that holds it – in any direction.
2. And it can’t be smaller than the largest object in the assembly – in any direction.
3. You cannot move an assembly so any part of it is outside of its project.

Watch this video to get an idea of how it all happens.

This link video  shows the important concept of measuring relative to assembly point of origin or project point of origin.  Point of origin = the point where left = bottom = front = zero.