Adding only One constraint makes object behave as if it is Grounded

[nostopin]

Greetings all, I have been having a issue with constraints in Inventor 2013. On occasion when working in an assembly, whenever I constrain a part/assembly to another it does not allow me to move the object. For instance; Constraining a piston axis to a cylinder axis should leave the rotational motion as well as the linear motion free to move. But it doesn't. The piston is locked in all aspects of movement just from that one constraint. Previous times this has happened to others at work, they have had bad constraints (red +) on the items, once they fixed the Red +, the issue was no longer there, and everything went back to normal. In my case, I have no Red +'s, and all assemblies inside this assembly are properly constrained. No issues with other parts. It is driving me nuts not being able to swing a door open to check for interference, or grab a part to see if it is fully constrained. I have read in the Autodesk Help, Something about "Automatic constraint to joint conversions" I don't know if this has anything to do with my issue or not, but it says to check the settings: On the "ribbon" select; Dynamic Simulation tab; Manage panel; Simulation Settings. I have no "Dynamic Simulation tab. I'm lost, and its driving me crazy. Thanks for any help you can give me. This is driving me nuts, and making things move much slower.

 

[nostopin]

More to the story. When this happens, I of coarse try the universal Inventor fix of closing and restarting inventor. It does not help. How ever this morning, when I opened the model, it was fine. The very last thing I did yesterday was to try and move an item with only one constraint, but I was unable. The very first thing I tried this morning was to move the same item with only one constraint, and I was able to.

 

[gmarken]

I cannot offer you a solution, but I have the same issue as you describe. I am running 2013 as well. It is an annoying problem.

 

[nostopin]

I agree. I have other constraint issues (such as driving constraints) that seam to appear out of the blue. I was in a design review meeting yesterday with a very large system i was showing off. Halfway through the review, I was unable to drive any of my constraints anymore. "cannot solve at (or near) this point. Check drive parameters and adaptivity settings" was the message I got. It seams that issues can be so deep rooted into a model, that you have no way of finding the one small thing that leaves everything else inoperable

 

[gmarken]

Correcting mate errors can be such a pain. The other issue that really is annoying are insert mates. They are so nice to use, but often times we will check fully constrained assemblies into Vault with no mate errors what so ever. Perfect. Then when you open the assembly from vault the next time all of the insert mates will be flagged with errors. This happens with content center parts mostly but insert mates will fail on user created parts as well.