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@Paul_Arden

Thanks for your detailed responses.

Exploded views are certainly an interesting work around. Hopefully named positions will be supported in the future.

I'm glad that decals will be supported coming from Part Studios. Hopefully the rest of this post will become moot.

So far, my experience with using projectors with "surface" mode and faces of a part has been extremely frustrating and confusing. Unfortunately, it's the only way I can get graphics to show up where I want them.

I made a model of some rack mounted equipment. The top image shows the part with grooves in the front face as fake gaps between the equipment. In the Part Studio, it took me less than 1/2 hr to place all the images using the decal feature. I needed to scale them all, and in some cases I needed to tweak the position a small amount because the images are not perfectly cropped.

In Render Studio I spent many many hours pulling my hair out trying to sort things out.

Step 1: Add sticker overlay to selected face.

If you don't change the Sticker Mask to 1 from its default of 0, nothing shows up. I don't understand why 1 wouldn't be the default.

Step 2: Add "Import bitmap file" to sticker.

When I was trying to drag this function onto the sticker appearance, I could swear that I wasn't seeing the blue highlights at first. Either they weren't showing up, or I wasn't noticing them. Now it seems more obvious, but I would still argue 99% of the time, if I want to add a "sticker", I also want to add a bitmap to the color. This extra step of searching for the "import bitmap file" function seems silly (I've also been using the one which says "bitmap texture" - I don't know if that's the right one, but I couldn't get the other one to work). I get that there are fancier things that can be done with dragging a bitmap onto some of the other inputs, but in this case it's baffling to me what one would do with the sticker appearance without a bitmap controlling the sticker color. Perhaps the sticker could be used just to add a bump map or glossiness in an area that's controlled by a mask. That's great, but make it a separate, more advanced function, or optional modes for sticker.

If I don't change Y Tiling to -1, the images are flipped from top to bottom. It took me a little while to realize that this was happening. Again, I have no idea why this would be the standard behavior. I didn't have this issue with the decals in the Part Studio. I tried using this with and without Clip on, and with and without a Projector. I still have no clue what units, if any the Offsets are. Any time something has units, they should be displayed. It's very frustrating to guess if something is in the range of 0..1 or -1..1 or actual measurements, which might be in meters, or mm (what I'm using as standard) or something unitless but a much larger range.

Then we get to Step 3 - projectors.

Why is the button to add a projector next to the transform tool? Transform is more like a direct editing tool. Projectors are much more like Appearance Functions or Appearance Modifiers (and BTW, why are those different classes of things?).

The position and the scale of the projectors are baffling. I have four identically sized dummy panels which are each separate faces of one part in the model. The top one needs these settings to get the image to show in the right location and scale.

The bottom one has these settings. I don't understand why the Y positions are different, although I can guess that perhaps the position is relative to some part or world coordinates instead of the face centroid (i.e. the way that decals work in Part Studios). But what makes zero sense to me is why the Y scale is so different for the same sized face and the same image.

I spent hours getting all this to work. Every time I select a face and want to get to the Projector, I have to rescroll the Scene List to get to the projectors. Getting images to show up in the right place with right scale is complicated by a couple things:

1. if the image is not visible on the object, there are several places (sticker, bitmap, projector) where one or more entries could cause there to be no image
2. when a face is selected, it highlights the whole face which makes accurate previewing challenging because the highlighting greatly distorts the colors and contrast.
   
   

In the Part Studio, the Decals all have "maintain aspect ratio" turned on, but none of the projectors I needed in Render Studio have identical X/Y scaling.

Keyshot apparently has a feature in their decal mode where an image at a known scale (expressed in DPI - dots per inch) can be applied 1:1 on a part so it will be whatever size was specified in a design document created in Adobe Illustrator or whatever. That seems like a super useful option. For things like logos and other product graphics, being able to control the exact size and position are essential.

First of all thanks for developing new curve creation idea, I dig it. First I learned about it was last Wednesday and I tested it during the week. I believe some of my feedback was already shared with you via different channel, but I'll post something here as well, so it's in one place. :)

I do look on Control point curve as an improved Bridging curve (or Beziér in 2D) and Routing curve is somewhat similar to 3D Fit Spline (or Spline in 2D). I won't touch the plumbing capabilities and creating of Polyline since I don't find them useful for my applications. On the other hand I'm not saying it's not worth having them there - I believe there are a lot of people, who find them useful.

1. UI is really complex and messy, but it's first draft, so I won't be so critical about it, just mentioning it.
2. I don't like the idea of Swiss knife feature. It's nice it can do various things, but I don't think the end result would be so great. It would make much more sense to divide it into few features, which UI is beefed up to become simple, direct and easy to use.
2a. Currently you first need to rebuild (or build from Vertexes) a curve, after that you can make some changes. If you decide the input should be different, all the changes done in the same feature, at the same time are simply lost and you need to start over. That doesn't sound good. I would prefer having one feature for build or rebuild curve, setting some basic values as degree + span and start/end tangency.
2b. I don't think it's useful to select number of points. If you typed in degree 5, you have 6 CVs, not 4, not 7, just n+1. Also I don't know why we're adding extra CVs for start/end tangency - why don't we use the existing generated point and move it to 3D space, where the it keeps the tangency? There seems to be two inputs in collision - one tries to follow the shape of input curve, another one tries to keep position of CVs proportional. And on top of that we add (optional) 2 CVs for start/end tangency.
3. It would be nice to see different type of triad manipulator as an option for CV movement. Having option to select more points to move (as mentioned earlier) would be also nice. Sometimes you want to add some weight to mid CV, add one from each direction and move them together with different weight movement.
3a. Speaking of triad manipulator, I really liked the way Alias moves CVs. The ability is expanded more when you change shape of surface using different hulls. Feel free to check whole video, but from 5:00 there's quick showcase: https://youtu.be/j-TTBF-yj-0?feature=shared&t=300
4. Make piecewise Beziers - looks like it creates multi-span curve. On one side, there's nothing wrong with them, on the other I prefer simple single span curves with degree 5 for example. Is there a way to change the position of edit points in between the spans? I haven't find it.
5. Knots - what to do with them? There's no editing option, will there be any? Can we change the magnitude from one side? And in the end - do we need to change that? Can't we just rely on the math and move the control points (or edit points for Routing curve)?

In the end, I still need to do some testing and dig into it even more. But I definitely see it as rebuilding feature for curves, which are created in a horrible way or have huge amount of edit points and terrible overall curvature.

I'm looking forward for new updates. :)

@S1mon apologies I misread your initial post and see you were asking about "Named positions" rather than "Named views". We don't currently support named positions from Assemblies in Render Studio but there is a bit of a work around you can use for now. You can abuse the exploded views by activating the named position you want and then creating an exploded view with that position active. Then activate the other named position you want and create another exploded view. You can then switch between the exploded views by right clicking the inserted Assembly in Render Studio and selecting the appropriate item to activate the exploded view you want, which will make the change without reloading anything.

Regarding decals, keep in mind that we do not intend the Sticker appearance to be any kind of replacement for a full decal feature such as that seen in Part Studios, it's just a way you can get something resembling a decal onto things in Render Studio with the tools it has now (and pre-dated having decals in Onshape at all). The right way would definitely be to support the decals coming from Part Studios and render those appropriately.

For use cases where you have geometry that represents the extent of a decal area already (e.g., a screen or area that will be fully occupied by it) the best approach is to select the surface and apply a projector with the "Surface" mode, which will cause any applied textures to stretch over the entire surface. This avoids having to do complex positioning of the image. Obviously when you want to have free positioning of the thing in a way that doesn't take up the entire surface, that is where decals really work better.

For the Tech Tip, you are right, it's now very out of date. It is showing the old Render Studio interface, so it doesn't make use of the newer, simpler projectors and also doesn't show the version creation step since that wasn't previously part of the workflow. We'll have to look into creating some updated information.

The "yellow button" question is basically a request for "Workspace references" which we do have in our lists (feel free to submit another request to add to the calls for it). It's quite complex so we don't have any timeframes for that one given some of the other priorities we have.

Is the drag and drop target for layering really obscure? Currently when you start dragging any compatible parameters in the appearances are highlighted with a large blue rectangle. Dropping on the entire appearance panel would not work since you can assign it to many potential parameters and the parameters of different appearances may be different. You can assign an the Bitmap image function to any color or number parameter and multiple of them.

This relates to why the bitmap is not directly part of every appearance, since you can use a texture on most of the parameters, so if we put the bitmap directly in every appearance we'd need to have one for every parameter that supported it. That would then also prevent you connecting non-bitmap things to the parameters, for example the tile or checker procedurals which you may prefer to use instead. This is why the sticker doesn't have the bitmap directly in its top level parameters, since the color defines the color of the sticker and you can drive that from a variety of things.

The "Display screen" appearance does work more like what you suggest where the bitmap is there at the top level, since in this case it is clear you will only ever want to use an image. You'll notice though that for this appearance the bitmap transform parameters then have to also be included in the appearance parameters. That would not be possible when you could potentially have to have multiple parameters with different bitmaps with different transform parameters on them.

When you refer to the bitmap, projector and transform functions having their own icons, do you mean in the Appearance functions folder of the library? One of the Bitmap image functions is a simpler one which has the transforms and projection items all build in with top level parameters and if your use case is simple these are the best to use. The others are for more advanced use cases (or non bitmap functions) where you want to manipulate the texture placement in more advanced ways that you cannot achieve with the Projector feature. They are not part of the advanced Bitmap image since for that you could potentially use different types of projectors and transforms in different combinations. That usage is definitely more advanced and may be phased out at some stage but since it had it previously and people were using it at times we didn't want to remove it.