Depending on your background and your need, what a Assembly is and should do will vary quite a bit. FreeCAD have not yet an official assembly but for many users the Body and Part containers introduced in 0.17 is enough. For more advanced assemblies there are several workbenches available that in different ways implement a assembly feature. What works best for you and your project is highly dependent on what you are trying to achive.
FreeCAD 0.17
in FreeCAD 0.17 the "body" and "part" containers was introduced, this enables you to group and position your models manually with either absolute or relative positioning to other models.
Tutorials:
Documentation:
Forum threads:
"Official assembly"
initially on the roadmap for the 0.15 release but delayed, development was halted many years ago as the developer left the project.
Tutorials:
Documentation:
Forum threads:
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=3979
Assembly2
User “Hamish” created a workbench allowing using constraints on solids.
Since User “Hamish” has announced stop providing support for his workbench and is not fully compatible with FreeCAD 0.17 and above?
Tutorials:
Documentation:
Forum threads:
A2plus
An effort initiated by kbwbe, based on assembly2. A2Plus is under active development, implements assembly solver and constraints in python on top of mainline FreeCAD 0.17, 0.18
Tutorials:
https://youtu.be/mnkecA9S7kc
Documentation:
https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/A2plus_Workbench
https://github.com/kbwbe/A2plus
Forum threads:
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=29207
Assembly3
Assembly workbench based on realthunders heavily modified version of FreeCAD, implements support for SolveSpace solver and python solver.
Realthunders branch of freecad solves/improves the situation of several known issues such as:
- Link implementation
Topological Naming
Improved Step import with partial loading and more.
UPDATE
It is now available for testing as part of the Linux AppImage and DMG in the current development version pre_0.19 from:
https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/releases/
That means the Asm3 functions can be tested without the special build from realthunder.
Tutorials:
https://youtu.be/UYHIX1IEfTE
Documentation:
https://github.com/realthunder/FreeCAD_assembly3/wiki
Forum threads:
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=25712
Assembly4
Another assembly workbench based on realthunders branch of FreeCAD, but focused on manually locking models to LCS, not based on a solver.
Tutorials:
https://github.com/Zolko-123/FreeCAD_As ... TORIAL1.md
Documentation:
https://github.com/Zolko-123/FreeCAD_Assembly4
Forum threads:
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=34806
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=32843
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=34585
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