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Best Of
Re: How can I quickly produce a 90 deg cruved part
Delete faces is like an intelligent magic eraser. I saw those little trenches were probably giving the algorithm trouble for sweeping or lofting etc. So if you just select the faces of those trenches and patch them up it will “heal”. When you sweep for example you can’t self intersects during the creation and it was probably doing that during the sweep in that area. Honestly if I were to do this from scratch I would use @MDesign idea with some variables for the face sweep profile sketch with another top sketch to guide the path with length and radius variables along with an offset amount for the end interlocking feature after the initial sweep.
Re: How to set a distance between a segment and another element, "away" in the 3D view
In the sketch you can select the edge of semi-circle and select the "use" command, from there you can use is as a reference.
Or you might be able to just show sketch2 and dimension from the "tip" of the circle directly
Re: simulation stress on wrench
Greetings WJT,
Thank you for providing a copy of your simulation wrench model. As Eric correctly suspects, we have split the faces and used Simulation Connections to selectively apply Mates between the two Parts.
In this particular case, we have applied a series of three Planar Mates, each of which enforces a sliding planar interface between the compressive halves of the wrench's parallel faces. In order to achieve this effect, one must:
- Split the faces of the wrench in (approximately) half. I happened to make the loaded portion slightly smaller than the unloaded portion, since I know that there is a slight "spill over" in the Simulation Connection region.
- Create a set of Mate Connectors associated with the wrench that coincide with the bolt's faces (or visa versa). Since the bolt and the wrench are modeled with slight clearances, these additional Mates are necessary. The clearances here are small enough that the simulation elements will easily span the gap.
As one might expect, the differences in results between a Fastened interface and this Thrice-Planar interface are two fold:
- The "Fastened" model artificially lowers the stresses on the regions of the wrench in contact with the bolt.
- The "Fastened" model places more strain on the arm of the wrench than does the "Planar" model, which has more "give" to it.
The choice of loading strategy is somewhat up to you. I have chosen to apply a moment over the faces of the wrench handle, but a linear force would do just fine.
I hope that helps and thank you for the question! Please write back if we can help clear up anything else.
Best Regards,
Chris
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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