I work in the furniture industry and we deal with families of products as well as custom sizes. I want to use top-down assemblies/modeling along with configurations to drive different pieces in a family. For example a design will have bar stool, counter stool and side chair versions. Each have different proportions but share common design details. Chairs require a lot of different planes to model. This also requires specific views in drawings and this is where I discovered the issue I am running into.

Using the "relative to model" views in a Solidworks drawing is known to not rebuild, like at all. If you change a dimension that moves the geometry that the relative view was based on, the view is now off. Completely worthless function IMO.

I am now trying to work around this by using a 3D sketch to drive a plane in my top level assembly. I want to use that plane as my front plane for my subsequent part(s). That way when I create a drawing the view that I really need, now the front plane, will change with different configurations driving the 3D sketch dimensions for the plane. Unfortunately this does not work. The front plane in the part is static and does seem to reference anything once it is created.

To be clear, i have no issues with Top-Down assemblies and configurations. My main issue is when I get to the drawings and almost every part requires a non-orthogonal view. Any changes to geometry require me to completely redo my drawings.

Looking for suggestions on workflow or how to get this to work. I have tried a lot of different things to no avail.

-J