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Best Of
Re: Improvements to Onshape - June 6th, 2025
Bingo. There's already a support ticket to that effect. Hopefully that will happen sooner than later.
S1mon
Re: Exporting Assemblies to Collada via the REST API?
Any formats that can be exported through the UI should also be exportable through the API. See below for what you should be looking for in the API Explorer.
Assemblies/PartStudios -> Get Translation Formats
Will return the list of formats that we support for assemblies and part studios. Note that although this request takes an elementId, at this point all elements of the same type will have the same export formats available.
Assemblies -> Create Assembly translation / PartStudios -> Create Part Studio translation
This will initiate the actual translation, which may not be finished when you receive the response. If the requestState is ACTIVE you should poll the href (Translations -> Get Translation Status) returned in the response (with a delay between each request) until the requestState returned is DONE or FAILED.
If the translation did not fail, you can then use the resultExternalDataIds field from the response in conjunction with Documents -> Download External Data to retrieve the data created by your translation request.
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Best,
Mike
Re: delete branch
More of a challenge we are finding is that all this "extra" data for branches, typically done in early conceptualization shows up when you perform a Search or when looking for components to reference or insert into Assemblies as Derived, so to @TimRice 's comment, yes there's impact downstream (lifecycle) to have unnecessary/irrelevant versions of Documents. Hence my post here:
Definitely would benefit to have some controls/options to mitigate the Branch clutter.
Re: Creating “animals”
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Here is a custom feature for making LEGO's:
Bricks
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/573b8871e4b0fddafb4e953e/w/3482dc4c7b56051dbbecde32/e/a3e6fde07829a53a3ae8451e…
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The easiest way to make animals will be to learn Blender or another mesh based cad software.
To do organic shapes well in Onshape you need to master surfacing, not just get by with it. The reason for this is because Onshape isn't made for organics and is more mechanically inclined. Because of this, it is extremely difficult to make organic shapes. That said, it is possible. The best way to master surfacing is to work through the entire Advanced Surfacing Pathway. Once you master that, you should have the basics down for how to manage surface creation as well as how surfaces meet and their surface quality. A tool that will be useful to avoid having to create tons of guide sketches, will be FreeformSpline by Evan.
Here is an example of a (terrible surface quality… 😅) horse head in Onshape.
There are better ways to make this, for example by using Evan's freeform spline, but this should be an ok starting point to learn from.
Knight - Chess Piece
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/7dbe152c0ceadd42bff627f4/w/e255b1492f0387cb85ac5423/e/8616b7051d…
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Re: Model Based Definition for Onshape announced by PTC
I see weld symbol support on there and some enums in the standard library. First party weld feature support soon?
I'm also interested to see how these symbols might allow for custom callouts in featurescript. If I could eliminate paint drawings and slap all my surface finish notes into the 3d view the painters are gonna have a much easier time understanding where to mask off parts and apply like colors across our weird builds.
Re: How Do I Make A Wolf In Onshape
And keep in mind, everybody, that wolves can only be created at full moon. ;0)
Re: Model Based Definition for Onshape announced by PTC
That's great! I can imagine that many companies needed MBD before they could switch to Onshape.
Model Based Definition for Onshape announced by PTC
From the improvement request thread for MBD, I just saw this shared:
Excited to see this. It seems like news like this should always be shared on the forums in addition to other channels.
S1mon
