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Mass Properties Tool is quite painful
The mass properties tool may be my third most used tool in Onshape, right after sketches and extrudes, and it's honestly quite painful.
The short version is that it is very slow to get a piece of information that other CAD tools have rapidly available. From a narrative perspective in say, Solidworks, clicking the mass properties tool will automatically select the complete file and promptly provide the requested mass properties.
In Onshape selecting the mass properties tool then requires additionally making a selection of what you'd like the mass properties of. Onshape's part studios make this seem like a good idea, as context makes it less obvious what you'd like the mass of, but in reality it just adds a bunch of clicks. In an assembly, I probably want the mass of the assembly. In a part studio, I probably want the mass of the part studio, and if I don't, I'll have to click the specific part anyway, so not default selecting everything is always a net negative on user clicks. Maybe the software could try and be clever in part studios and select the body most recently modified if nothing is selected. Once a selection is made you are treated to a spinny wheel in all cases while you wait for numbers to crunch. On larger models this is regularly more than 30s and not infrequently more than a minute. If you then close out and reopen the mass properties again, it takes just as long to recompute - hopefully you didn't just fat finger typing that number in somewhere else!
Once the mass properties are computed, you'll almost certainly be informed that "One or more parts do not have a material defined" which is a singularly unactionable error message (which parts?, how many? what fraction of the volume? does the part have an overridden mass in addition to no material?).
A hopefully concrete list of postive changes to the mass properties tool:
Cache computed values to reduce the delay in displaying recently computed values
Add a "dual unit" option to the mass properties tool (and measurement tool!) sometimes when dealing with vendor provided models you might be working in inches and mm or lbs and kgs. i.e Mass: 136.89 kg (301.79 lbs)
Using the mass property tool in an assembly auto-selects the top level assembly and starts computing mass immediately
Make it possible to create a mate connector at the center of gravity location.
List/Highlight/sort by parts with overridden masses or missing mass properties (might belong in the BoM view?)
Re: Is Possible to add parametric node with "sheet name" in title block?
Its already been proposed as an Improvement Request, see the link above in my last post. If you have not already, you can click this and vote for it at the top of the string.
Not entirely sure how this all gets conveyed pack to Onshape. People ask for stuff daily, some is easy, some is not. I think they watch the forum to some extent, and try to work out what the masses want, and how easy this is to implement. But a lot of requests they have already thought of I expect, and already implemented if they think its good idea.
That said, drawings seem to work as a different group, I think its the whole drawing area is not actually built in-house at Onshape, but by
? I think…. but I could be wrong.
And over the years I've been using Onshape, the drawing package has steadily improved. There is almost always something new in each 3 week update.
Try to keep bumping it up in the forum every now and again, so others see it and vote for it. Thats about all we can do.
Re: Grasshopper/Dynamo in Onshape?
You nailed it that it will be 1:1 featurescript std mapping, with some convention-based argument passing. But imagine that at some moment we will be able to create bindings to the user defined custom features and libraries. And the queries staying the glue, which makes the data flow from feature to feature, this will never change i guess. We can just ask for more robust and specific ones.
Konst_Sh
Re: Grasshopper/Dynamo in Onshape?
@MichaelPascoe onshape having severe outages the week the CADsharp toolbox goes into closed beta. Coincidence? 🤔
Re: Trouble Creating an Angled Face
Hey @pho_sho,
As Scotty said, the "Sweep" Tool would be a fit for this situation. Check out the documentation to learn more about how it works or also in this video.
Probably best to do the sweep first to add material to your part and then split it into two halves. If possible it would also be good to have your part symmetric from the mid plane if that is intended though.
Re: Trouble Creating an Angled Face
Hello. Since the Revolve won't work, Sweep would be the tool to use. In this document, I first tried the sweep using the right plane for the sweep profile but ran into some problems. Using the face of part 2 for the sketch plane, things worked out except for the far end of the sweep. That was fixed in the part studio copy. - Scotty
Re: Grasshopper/Dynamo in Onshape?
@S1mon soon to be announced. Waiting for approval from the Onshape app approval committee. I think they got swamped this week with the outage issues.
Re: Main Menu Missing?
We had a severe performance problem in production this morning. As always, we try hard to keep our status page at https://status.onshape.com up-to-date when we have issues like this. We appreciate your patience and apologize for the disruption to your work.
Re: Standard Content
What do you mean "like a commercial catalog"? What issues are you running into?
There are certainly things I find frustrating about standard content, but I've been using it a lot lately, and I can't imagine not having it.
My biggest pain points:
- A lot of relatively common things are missing.
- Sizes are missing.
- You can reconfigure to some degree, but you can't swap any screw type for any other screw type.
- You can't add "standard" OTS stuff that's missing that your company uses all the time.
S1mon
