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Best Of

Shaded view in break view

Hello,
I noticed that I am unable to have shaded views in my drawings if I am also using the break view feature simultaneously...are you aware of this and is there a way to fix it?
Thanks!

yuval_taff

Offline Is Just Online With Extreme Latency?

In general, I'm very much in favor of the requirement that Onshape needs to be connected to the cloud all the time in order to work. I've had multiple discussions with colleagues where I remind them that if they are in a situation where they don't have internet access, they likely can't do a bunch of other mission critical things like: communicate with remote coworkers/clients/partners, share files with vendors, research parts/materials/technology, check things in/out of their old-school PDM/PLM system, etc. In the reality of past jobs using Solidworks, even when I've been working somewhere where our PDM/license servers were on premise, on the rare occasions when the internet was down, it made trying to do work next to impossible, so people would just go home.

All that said, I find the premise of this blog post provocative and worth considering for Onshape's infrastructure and how it operates:
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/offline-is-online-with-extreme-latency/
[via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35626015 which has a bunch of relevant discussion]

Is there a way to reconsider the concept of "Onshape must be online all the time" such that Onshape has such and such approach to "extreme latency" where that might be hours or a day or two?

S1mon

Re: Improvements to Onshape - November 22nd, 2024

@S1mon

This is implemented in C++. FeatureScript isn't great for heavy computation. @Michael_Lauer, an Onshape founder, is the lead developer on this, BTW.
Maybe? What parameters would you like to tweak?
The method is not physics-based, so it's not simulating a real material. The primary goal is a robust approximate solution in reasonable time. We've done internal comparison against other CAD systems on performance and distortion and our method does well. But for physical accuracy and specific material properties, you have to go to a specialized simulation/analysis package.

ilya_baran

Re: Improvements to Onshape - November 22nd, 2024

One more thing on surface flatten: I'd like to acknowledge and thank Michael Rabinovich, Roi Poranne, Daniele Panozzo, and Olga Sorkine-Hornung for their excellent paper "Scalable Locally Injective Mappings," which served as the basis for our surface flattening algorithm.

ilya_baran

Re: Improvements to Onshape - November 22nd, 2024

A number of users have asked why flatten surface cannot be used in downstream features without reimporting and when that will be fixed.

We are planning to make it easier to use the flat by allowing export-to-tab, as well as further "comfort" enhancements.

What we are not currently planning to do is to allow flattening to be an automatically regenerating parametric feature that produces the flat surface: the algorithm is quite complex and numerically sensitive and the requirement to keep old versions regenerating perfectly will hamper our ability to make improvements in the future.

ilya_baran