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Best Of

Re: Improvements to Onshape - June 27th, 2025

Happy 200th!!! Some great improvements here.

josh_grasby942

Re: Frame Cut Lists K-Factor is 1?

Hey @Derek_Van_Allen_BD sorry meant to reply before this.

I posted something about the way cut list lengths are calculated a while back but it might take some digging to find the original post.

In your particular case (if I read it right that is: "planar circular bends of profiles that don't produce edges") I think that hits the codepath in cutlistMath of getLengthAndAnglesWithoutEdges(165) → getCircularArcBeamDimensions (228) → getMaxRadiusEdge.

You could experiment there (with a modified cutlistmath) to tune the approximation more to your liking. Even so, for profiles that don't produce edges (circular profiles), we end up creating isoparam curves (174) so an average "edge" might not be the exact centerline either.

Some background:

Cutlist lengths are not exact. I think they are at best, exact, and at worst, strict overestimates. As I (now dimly) recall there were several considerations that informed our strategy:
1. The neutral axis analysis for tube bending worked remarkably well in my textbooks and never at all in my experience. In my experience it's always an underestimate, and…
2. Underestimates are a pain in fabrication (it's hard to make a steel tube longer, easier to grind it shorter).
3. But the biggest factor is not obvious: Frames current implementation doesnt have the swepth path centerline information at length calculation time (and sometimes doesnt exist) so it's not used. If I were to rewrite frames today, I would certainly try to write this information (the defining edge / points / curve whatever) as an attribute for retrieval at custlist length calculation time so it could be used downstream but…
4. At the time I couldn't come up with such a strategy that worked in all cases (including oddball trimming cases). The solution I eventually got to was a reasonably robust and performant set of heuristics (cutlistMath.fs). But you can put it on my tombstone: "Geometric heuristics are guaranteed to be wrong some of the time".

Hopefully that sheds some light on why it works that way. It was intended to solve most problems adequately/workably for fabrication, rather than any but the simplest problems perfectly. But I know you can write your own cutlist calcs in for your application. Let me know what you come up with! Would love to hear about it.

jnewth

Re: Problem with OnShape

The curve constraint ensures that two curves (e.g. Bézier curves) have the same curvature at the connection point. This constraint does not turn straight lines into curves.

rafael_telgmann

Public document search is bizarrely limited!

I really think it'd benefit everyone if the search on public documents would at least allow sorting by likes.

When initially viewing the Public documents list, you can sort, but not after searching!

Maybe it's a bug?

jezmck

Working with larger dimensions (feet, meters etc)

Is there any way to scale up the UI when working with larger units? Things like default planes, font size etc in the main UI seem to be scaled for work at inches/mm scale. When I start zooming out to accommodate larger models, things get really really tiny (which makes stuff like selecting planes a pain).

I must be missing something. Went to the workspace units, but didn't see anything there - changing the default unit to a larger one didn't make a difference to the UI.

Anyone work with architectural-level sketches and models? What are your tricks?

tom_auger

Re: Improvements to Onshape - June 27th, 2025

Nice update. I have to say, I agree with some of the comments here about the new, mandatory navigation page view. I can't say its really making me feel uncomfortable or that I am finding it hindering my usual workflow but, it feels a bit like, "what was the point?" Maybe this view is just a stepping stone into something else that is actually going to make a navigational improvement? When it comes to changes to the navigation view, I am always disappointed that new abilities in being able to add in user preferred columns to the view never seem to include part number, revision, state. It baffles me that these columns are not considered important enough to merit adding support for right of the hop. Instead we are still stuck with viewing part number from that little tiny readout that is mixed into the name column and gets hidden if the column is not expanded out far enough.