Best Of

I've been working on this one for a while, and I think it's functional and stable enough to go ahead and publish. It's like the native Fit Spline feature, but you can add points to and drag them around in 3D space. There's a bit more to it than than so give this quick tour a watch. I'll probably use it mostly to route wires, ribbons, straps, etc. I may also find that it's helpful for making reference curves when doing surfacing. You can add the feature from here. Let me know if you find it useful or notice a bug with it.

Here's an example of something I'd really dread modeling without it.

Speaker Pattern takes a vertex or mate connector as input then patterns cylinders and performs a boolean operation to add or remove them from parts. See the example below:


I just got it to a usable state so I'm sharing here for people to use and so I can get feedback, and there is a lot of room to improve if/when I make the time:

1. add more pattern types (any suggestions?)
2. add end conditions like the extrude feature
3. make default size values more practical
4. find a way to visually clean up the middle of the Fibonacci pattern (even though it's mathematically "right")
5. add an option to select a custom modeled shape to pattern instead of the default cylinder
6. any other ideas?

I've been working on learning Featurescript, which is my first dive into programming in any language, and I couldn't have done this without lots of help from the forum. Special thanks to @NeilCooke @MBartlett21 @ilya_baran
 and @konstantin_shiriazdanov

Pick me, I am!  Honestly, when you marry #1 SaaS CAD (Onshape) with #1 SaaS PLM/QMS (Arena), you really have something to work with.  I think it transcends logo artwork, BTW.  PTC is playing to win here.

Jim Heppelmann

Some of you guys sure read a lot into a logo.  Almost like it was an Ouija board or something.  Let me be frank.  Jon Hirschtick commands immense respect and has immense power within PTC.  I've said many times publicly that I see Jon Hirschtick and John McEleney (and their team) as legends in CAD, and I'm beyond happy to have them on my team.  Jon owns Onshape - full stop, no debate.  He directs the roadmap, and he owns the culture.  Contrary to (conspiracy) theory, there are no homogenization plans here. 

What PTC is guilty of so far is 1) dramatically increasing Onshape funding and therefore staffing levels, far beyond VC levels of 1 year ago, 2) giving Jon total rights to draw upon any technology within PTC that he might want to incorporate into Onshape, such as generative design/Frustum which BTW he really likes (stay tuned), 3) funding several acquisition that Jon wanted to make (stay tuned again) that will show up as major step function improvements in Onshape, 4) committing to make the underlying Onshape platform (which we call "Atlas") to be PTC's future SaaS platform across the entirety of our portfolio, starting already with Vuforia, 5) helping the Onshape team double the size of the business in the first year, 6) throwing our whole academic/education department at Onshape, helping to drive to massive adoption in schools and colleges during COVID, now surpassing 1M students (OMG!!), and 7) spending another $715M to acquire Arena Solutions to give Onshape a full complement of BOM/PLM functionality that is important to win larger opportunities.  And we are but one year into it!  

Honestly, I think the color and shape of the logo means very little compared to tremendous level of support and investment PTC has provided to the Onshape team.  And, for the record, if Jon didn't like the logo, we would not have adopted it, because it isn't that important to you or to me.  Lets be clear - without a doubt - Jon Hirschtick is driving the Onshape bus, and that bus is gaining tremendous speed.  You are in good hands.

Cheers, and thanks to all of you, both for your appreciation, and your concern about Onshape!

Jim Heppelmann