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Best Of
Re: Automatic Assembly Sequence Generation
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Legit! Very impressive.
Ty for the offer! Personally I don't have need of this atm, I just develop and test things related to Onshape.
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Re: Automatic Assembly Sequence Generation
This is really interesting. I'll be testing it out in coming weeks
Re: Branch Clutter!
This sounds like a combination of things: Onshape could add some more guard rail functionality, AND a best practice needs to be developed and made explicit at your company. I personally don't see value in the twigs thing, and it could add an exponential level of complexity to the version graph.
Functionality I'm interested in:
- granular permissions for branches - There's value in thinking of each branch as "owned" by a certain person, and it could be valuable to give the ability to prevent everyone but the owner of a branch for editing it. There could be a single "Branch Settings" dialogue for branch permissions which lets you specify users, and certain action limitations (like releasing).
- selecting which branches are visible to import or search - As you say, it can become cluttered when you have 6 copies of the same part in 6 branches. It would be great to have a way to mark some branches as important, and others as not. It could be as easy as the "critical" branch items always sort to the top, but they're all still there. Even this could be part of the Branch Settings menu.
- An easy way to tell who made which branch - As with all collaborative environments, it's easier to add things than clean them up because it's risky to remove clutter that you didn't make and may not understand. It's the same reason shop spaces are usually a mess. Things flow into them freely, but no one knows what's garbage. If there were an easy way for people to know who made a branch they can ask them if it can be deleted now.
But there will always be a branch hygiene element to it, which is a sociological problem, not a software problem. It's about setting and keeping SoPs for how branches are and aren't used. An easy one could be to ask people to append their name to the branch name so it's obvious who to ask about it. Another could be getting clear on the CAD strategy before beginning a project. Before any work is done the whole project team should understand how data flows through the design, and at what milestone the project should split into multiple documents. (Often a good practice is to start in 1 doc while things are changing a lot, then split out once the design is beginning to gel). No amount of Onshape functionality can replace the team's mutual understanding of the CAD plan and SoPs. It's a compound challenge involving people, process, and tools, and the solution needs to address all 3. I help with this stuff at www.theonsherpa.com.
Re: Problems with loft and thickening
A few notes:
- There's a visual crease or kink in your surface, which is usually a bad thing. Consider modeling this in more than one surface patch. See the Intro To Surfacing lesson in the learning center
- You should aim to use fewer cross sections. You want to get to the end result with as little constraint on the surface as possible.
- When you thicken (or offset, or shell) it will fail if the offset surface begins to intersect itself. It's easier to visualize in 2D like this. Notice how it fails once the offset comes to a point.
You can evaluate the curvature of your surface with the Curvature Color Map tool. You can set it to minimum radius, and play with the color sliders to find the area of least curvature. When you mouse over the surface it shows the radius of curvature at that point. The smallest number here is the number at which your thicken will fail.
Re: Problems with loft and thickening
A link to a public doc often gets more people helping :)
Re: Mates (Center the Screen)
the advice is definitely not put everything in one part studio!
maybe take the assembly course in the learning center though? all of martin's options are good. since this week, there's even the new 'width mate'
Re: Improvements to Onshape - June 6th, 2025
Can't wait for the sheet metal loft update 😁
Re: Improvements to Onshape - June 6th, 2025
As for the demo shown in that tech tip, the piecewise segmented loft approach has its own limitations for faceting. I've attempted to modify another version of someone's custom faceted loft script but that approach can fail in cases where the segments of curves on one side of the loft can't be aligned with like segments on the opposite side and require triangulation instead of a flat parallel extrusion face. This especially happens in offset lofting cases. I never got around to researching fully how to handle those cases, but I imagine the devs encountered a similar hangup and that's why we still have yet to see that tool hit the core feature set.
Re: Improvements to Onshape - June 6th, 2025
I'm not one of the devs at Onshape but I've bullied their sheet metal kernel enough to make some educated guesses how things work under the hood. The main barrier to lofted sheet metal is guaranteeing that the seed surfaces defining the sheet metal bodies are developable and zero gaussian curvature underneath. Cylinders are a developable surface because their curvature is inherently parallel to their axis of revolution. Cones are an inherently developable surface because they consist of straight line geometry pointing towards their central axis, but these UV curves are no longer parallel in their unfolded state. Lofted faces don't necessarily carry zero gaussian curvature depending on the inputs used so they need to be evaluated at runtime to check the curvature across the entire surface to determine developability. Or you allow non-zero gaussian curvature but evaluate everything piecewise as the surface flatten tool does, but now your script is computationally insane depending on how granular your simulation is.
The funny thing is lofted sheet metal technically already is supported if your underlying surfaces have no draft or twist to them. The only first party way to make the geometry is using the extrude option for sheet metal but I've got a script that does a surface extrusion and a replace face on any input body to force label the valid spliney faces as extrusion geometry so the sheet metal convert tool will unfold the parts and give you a flat pattern.
Geometrically there's no difference between the seed part's faces before the custom face fixer script runs and after, it's just that extrusions have a geometric neutral axis that can be read and trusted implicitly by the sheet metal kernel, where lofted faces need that extra interrogation step.
The fun thing is the 3d side of the sheet metal engine already just works for the real complicated twisty cases if you can set things up so the feature runs in a single convert step (and disable all geometry checks in your own custom fork of the sheet metal tool), it just fails to do the unfolding stage at the moment.
