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Re: Problems with loft and thickening
A few notes:
- There's a visual crease or kink in your surface, which is usually a bad thing. Consider modeling this in more than one surface patch. See the Intro To Surfacing lesson in the learning center
- You should aim to use fewer cross sections. You want to get to the end result with as little constraint on the surface as possible.
- When you thicken (or offset, or shell) it will fail if the offset surface begins to intersect itself. It's easier to visualize in 2D like this. Notice how it fails once the offset comes to a point.
You can evaluate the curvature of your surface with the Curvature Color Map tool. You can set it to minimum radius, and play with the color sliders to find the area of least curvature. When you mouse over the surface it shows the radius of curvature at that point. The smallest number here is the number at which your thicken will fail.
Re: Problems with loft and thickening
A link to a public doc often gets more people helping :)
Re: Mates (Center the Screen)
the advice is definitely not put everything in one part studio!
maybe take the assembly course in the learning center though? all of martin's options are good. since this week, there's even the new 'width mate'
Re: Improvements to Onshape - June 6th, 2025
Can't wait for the sheet metal loft update 😁
Re: Improvements to Onshape - June 6th, 2025
As for the demo shown in that tech tip, the piecewise segmented loft approach has its own limitations for faceting. I've attempted to modify another version of someone's custom faceted loft script but that approach can fail in cases where the segments of curves on one side of the loft can't be aligned with like segments on the opposite side and require triangulation instead of a flat parallel extrusion face. This especially happens in offset lofting cases. I never got around to researching fully how to handle those cases, but I imagine the devs encountered a similar hangup and that's why we still have yet to see that tool hit the core feature set.
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.
