Q: Is it better to have nested models, or 1 model with many links?
A: I would suggest you use one model with many links if you can, nested models are quite new in Gazebo and not as well tested as links.
Q: Is the following workflow viable? Are the alternatives?
A: Yes, I believe that's a common workflow. Some people might prefer doing everything in a text editor, and you can always go back to the model editor and edit it again.
Q: Whats a good workflow to align/place links together? Is it only computing the points by hand?
A: If you have simple shapes it might be easy to compute by hand, but in any case the model editor provides the align and snap tools which should make this easier to do graphically if you want.
Originally posted by chapulina with karma: 7504 on 2016-07-05
This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site
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Original comments
Comment by JuliusS on 2016-07-05:
Thanks, as a barely related question:
Do you think gazebo community is being hindered by the difficulty of simple tasks?
For example, I just noticed that my robot is aligned with -X axis, but I would like it to be aligned with +X.
Since I cannon rotate precisely in GUI multipli links, I will have to take all pose information of links, compute a rotation about Z+ about some point and apply back to all poses.
Comment by chapulina on 2016-07-05:
The model editor is being continuously enhanced, the issue you've described is known ;) https://bitbucket.org/osrf/gazebo/issues/1416/enable-multi-select
