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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 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.
Re: New Feature: Delaunay Triangulation
Status update: I did get voronoi working but that's much less exciting than the other development. I got an 80x performance increase by simply breaking the cardinal rule of featurescript. By shoving the calculation results into an editing logic function I can cut rebuild time immensely at the minor cost of removing the parametric nature of the function. It now builds purely on stale references until prompted to update at which point the lag machine switches on for long enough to build the new geometry and return to snappy operational speeds.
Maybe not exciting for this particular application but if applied to @EvanReese's Surface Drape function or a tight fit packing algorithm for Auto Layout I think I'm gonna start abusing editing logic functions as a cache and throw away my parametric tethers for some features.
Re: Improvements to Onshape - June 6th, 2025
Thank you for Conical Faces to flat pattern ! Very good !
Re: Split Tabs Inside Onshape
A second monitor is really handy. Run another OS on second screen and display any tab you like.
Highly recommended when going through the learning center lessons.
Re: Automatic Assembly Sequence Generation
Thanks Michael! Love the feedback. We took a look at your model and it's quite interesting. The current version of the product doesn't handle threaded parts which explains why the parts couldn't be disassembled. However, we have an update coming very soon where AutoAssembler will give you a plan like this
We also noticed that the model has several interferences (mostly within the purchased trucks)
We're looking into the issue where the wheel faces weren't shown. AutoAssembler today can understand (modeled) CAD interferences and work around them. We'd love to talk to you and give you a deeper look into AutoAssembler! Let me know and I'll DM you :) .
Sai
Re: Improvements to Onshape - June 6th, 2025
I also didn't understand from the video that this still required a cylindrical mate to constrain the rotation of my two parts. My initial impression was that this would a more like a revolute where the centers and axis would line up as you describe @S1mon.
Re: How to move a sketch with its part?
Hello,
thank you very much for your very detailed comments and tips!
I have already milled the 5 parts (Mac mini, intermediate part, compartment for the backup hard disk, intermediate part, monitor stand) from one piece, without any problems, but only as a test from an OSB board; I will mill it in spruce wood and make some changes beforehand (e.g. the compartment for the mini is too wide and not high enough; I was limited by the thickness of the OSB board which is 23 mm I will use a spruce board of 37mm).
The connections are there to position the compartment for the mini so that it doesn't interfere with the monitor.
Your tip with the second browser window is good; I've been doing it so far by copying the workspace from time to time so that I can make changes to the new file that don't affect the original.
The whole operation is not aimed at saving a few euros (I live in Europe), but is a challenge for me in Onshape and an occupation for my milling machine, which doesn't work enough, as I use it purely as a hobby, or my 3d printer.
ProApe