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Best Of
Improvements to Onshape - July 18th, 2025
This release contains a wide variety of features and improvements touching virtually all areas of the product: Configurations, Assemblies, Surfacing, Drawings, Data Management, as well as CAM and Render Studio! We hope there's something out there for everyone!
CAD IMPROVEMENTS
CONFIGURATION INPUTS IMPROVEMENTS
There have been several usability improvements to Onshape configurations, specifically around defining and managing your configuration inputs.- The assigned default value for a configuration input is now displayed in the configurations panel
- Configured dimensions can be renamed
- List values can be reordered by drag-and-drop
- Configuration inputs can be reordered by drag-and-drop
- You can expand or collapse all configuration inputs in one click
ASSEMBLY INTERFERENCE DETECTION - TOP LEVEL ONLY
You can now filter assembly interference detection results to show top-level interferences only.MARK-UP IN REPLY COMMENT
Reply comments can now include mark-ups, attachments, and can tag entities in the same way an initial comment can.ASSEMBLY PERFORMANCE PANEL IMPROVEMENTS
The Assembly Performance panel displays an icon when it detects longer than expected mate solve times. Expanding the panel will display a message at the bottom, providing suggestions as to how to improve mate solve times.
TRIM FRAME WITH MATE CONNECTOR
The Frame trim feature now supports the use of a Mate connector as a face selection with which to trim.DXF / DWG EXPORT UNITS
You can now override the default workspace or drawing units when exporting a DXF or DWG.STRAIGHT/PARALLEL PIPE TAP THREADS
You will now find Straight pipe tap thread types in the Hole feature.
As you might expect, these new standards are correctly called out in Part studio hole tables, as well as hole callouts and thread representations in Drawings.
SHEET METAL FLAT PATTERN VIEWS - PROPERTIES
In the Drawing properties, under views, you will now find several additional controls for the line styles and colors of different sheet metal features in your flat pattern views.
SURFACING IMPROVEMENTS
CURVE / SURFACE ANALYSIS IMPROVEMENTS
The Curve/Surface Analysis tool now displays control points, knot points, polynomial degree, and number of spans.ENCLOSE - PREVIEW GAPS
The Enclose feature now previews any gaps on screen that would prevent the feature from rebuilding.DATA MANAGEMENT IMPROVEMENTS
STRUCTURE VIEW IMPROVEMENTS
Structure view now shows an icon when a contained reference has been been obsoleted. This is also true for referenced drawings when using the Show drawings feature. Additionally, an export icon is available directly from the Structure view page, allowing you to export individual elements without having to open the containing document.COPY LINK FROM VERSION AND HISTORY
You can now directly copy the URL to any point in the Version and history graph, without having to open that node.
SORT FOLDERS IN GRID VIEW
While in grid view, you may now sort your folders alphabetically, reverse-alphabetically, or by last modified.
NOT REVISION MANAGED - PART STATUS
Any parts that are marked in their properties as Not revision managed now display this part status in the assembly instance list properties.
RENDER STUDIO IMPROVEMENTS
PANORAMIC AND STEREO RENDERING
You can now build and export panoramic exr/hdr files for use in a render studio scene. These panoramic renderings represent and the environmental lighting for a scene that you can then use to render your subject in.Panoramic scenes (such as the default ones provided in Render studio) are otherwise complicated to create, and often require expensive physical hardware to photograph. Being able to define them yourself in a Render studio allows for unmatched control of your lighting environment, for both total unique or very consistent results across multiple renderings.
For full documentation on this feature, please visit the help page.
DRAG-AND-DROP APPEARANCES
The default behavior when dragging and dropping appearances to the graphic area has changed. The appearance will now default to being applied to the entire part, rather than the individual face.
ASSEMBLY FOLDER STRUCTURE
Render studio now maintains the assembly folder structure of instances that you have defined in your Onshape assembly.
CAM STUDIO IMPROVEMENTS
TOOLBAR UI
The CAM Studio interface has been updated to a toolbar-based design. Inserting, Defining jobs, Machines, and Setups will feel much more intuitive to an Onshape-based environment by selecting features from a single toolbar across the top of the graphics area.Please take a moment to try out these new features and improvements and leave your comments below. For a detailed list of all the changes in this update, please see the changelog.
Attractor Pattern is Magic
I can't make this model public, but I do want to share some techniques.
The main body of this part has top surfaces which are not all one face. I grabbed the left/right edges of the surface to create 3D Fit Splines and created a loft between them (which creates a single face with more even parameterization). I moved the edges inward with the surface tools, then I rebuilt that surface again using another loft - this made the UV lines evenly spaced and even offsets from the sides of the base shape. The pattern body is just an extruded pill (race track, or oval) which is taller than the final result. I split the whole result with an offset surface to get the tops to be curved where the main body curves. If I didn't do that, the tops would all be flats which work most places, but looked really wrong in the curved portion.
The other big revelation (maybe this is obvious to others) was that the attractors do not need to be in the plane or surface that drives the pattern. I split the driving surface (described above) to handle the quick change of the pattern around the letters (and picked those faces as attractors), but I also wanted a long fade on the left hand of this image. I added a surface which was slightly offset from the original, and then rotated slightly to taper its effect as an attractor (see second image).
Selection Fillet (also from Evan) played a supporting role in this pattern. It creates the fillets that been the bumps into the main body, and rounds the tops of them off. I needed this since I was scaling the shape and it's not on a simple flat body.
S1mon
Re: Autodesk to acquire PTC
Autodesk bought Eagle CAD (my favorite free schematic/PCB program). First they added a yearly license fee, and then they abandoned it altogether. I guess the plan was to force users like me to learn a new AutoDesk tool and pay for the privilege. That didn't work. I'm a KiCad user now.
I hate it when companies use preditory tactics to form a monopoly.
Re: Adding dimensions to an isometric view.
Re: Improvements to Onshape - June 27th, 2025
All, just a quick note to say:
Thank you for the feedback on the new document page redesign. We are continuing to work on improving what was a large change that lays the groundwork for more functionality and better performance in the documents page, some of which you have already seen (default column sorting, column resizing, pinning/add/removing columns, filtering, etc.).
As a side note: the documents page has to serve the needs of students with a handful of documents all the way to our Enterprise users who have large folder / projects / document / product structure hierarchies as well as external users. Some of issues brought up could be considered edge cases, but we're taking all those into account as we work on improvements regardless.
Re: Workspace Protection in practice?
For us, it hasn't worked out at all. The problem is that before you can Merge your changes back into Main (if Main is protected), the versions of main and the branch have to match exactly, or the Merge won't be allowed. This condition (where the onshape version of the branch matches the main version) exists briefly after you create the branch and Protect Main. However, if much time goes by (max 3 weeks!) now the branch and the Main may no longer share Onshape versions (because of the great update cadence).
Infuriatingly, this causes the merge to fail, and the only way to make it work was to:
- merge Main into your working branch (I think you might have to unprotect to do this)s, but keep all the branch tabs geometry (merge, but don't merge any actual tabs)
- then try to Merge your branch back into Main
Often this would fail, or I would make a mistake, or the merge wouldn't take, or something…so I would typically have 2 -3 merges back and forth between Main and my Branch…just to get the conditions to be just right to Merge back into the protected workspace.
Generally, it was far too much work, and we've stopped trying for now.
I really liked the minor barrier to working in Main (you could just Unprotect it to get around it) because it helped us remember to work in the correct branch. But the major hassle also meant that we could: a) Release from the Branch (which we didn't want to do) or b): turn off Protected Workspaces…thereby making the whole thing ineffective.
I've submitted feedback and (I think) a support ticket or two on this.
Basically, they need the Onshape version updates in the background to be ignored by the Protected Workspace - so that the tiny, behind-the-scenes differences don't gum up the works. I haven't tried it for several months, but also haven't noticed anything about updates or new functionality - so I don't know if this issue persists today.
