Best Of

sorry, forgot to make public:

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/b08acb3b79f42f8e5008740a/w/d1a55166098ecdeb1b2675e0/e/5f0750551e96fa080dcb00a3

Wow. That's an epic project you have started! Thank you for putting in the time and effort for this. I think most of us would just be happy with that list at the start but you're going further with docummentation!

Bookmarking this one.

Hi Max,

This looks like a solid use case for combining FeatureScript with the Onshape API to pull part data from assemblies and generate something printable. I can put together a clean, maintainable solution that handles the labeling and sizing logic.
Happy to walk you through how I would approach it.

You can reach out to me on my email here

Colin

Right on, well enjoy your time off!

As someone who doesn't know enough about this stuff, I wonder if an AI could crawl the entire forum and infer the top features and their descriptions. Any of you geniuses know how to do that? The forum is still the main place for me to find custom features, but only because I keep up with new posts week-to-week and have for years. If I were just coming to Onshape I don't know whether I'd catch up on that.

I'm pleased to announce that my Publish geometry Custom feature is now… published.

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/40d43cad542dccfa4772d7e1/v/856bd2b631f7e35c4a2b34ad/e/788996d08647863b81b2ff61

Like many other CAD systems (Creo, CATIA etc) the Publish geometry is intended to make Top Down Design workflows much more efficient by providing an easy way to collate references (bodies, faces, curves, sketches, mate connectors) needed for certain downstream activities into a single feature. This feature creates a (composite) part that can be Derived into other Part Studios, into the same or other documents.

Because the Publish geometry creates a part, it can be version/revision managed, ensuring that downstream collaborators always are working with the correct references.

The Publish geometry can also be inserted into an assembly to provide a "scaffold" for assembly of other instances. For this reason, the "Exclude from BOM" property is set by default, though you can override this.

Intended usage is for this feature to be used on high level, skeleton (early concept/layout) parts, and NOT at the end of a multi-hundred feature epically detailed Part studio. The reason for this? When a Derive feature is used, it regenerates and carries along with it the contents of the whole part studio. So even if you only "published" one face, it will carry the weight of everything else in the Part studio. Hence it should be used early in skeleton/layout Part Studios where you are laying out the interfaces, the key keepin/keepout bodies, the key csys/datums (Mate connectors!) and so on.

If you do have a complex assembly (either from a an existing native Onshape assembly or a giant imported STEP file) then it can be used in the following way: create an in-context Part studio (ICPS) of the assembly, then in that ICPS, use the Publish geometry feature on only the key references you need! The double good whammy here is that 1) the ICPS will ensure that the Part studio is lightweight, and 2) you get all the benefits of the Publish geometry workflow.

I made a quick video to introduce this:

Thanks for your feedback!
I was not secretly hoping that my initiative would reach “you”.
As I mentioned, I will be gone for 2 weeks, but I intend to finish everything I started in August.
I am aware that the story is endless, but I will undertake the editing up to 250 pages, the important thing would be that each page is filled with authentic and relevant information.

(What motivated me?
Maybe it was that I wanted to see an information document like this, but I haven’t come across one in half a year, so I created it!
That’s just how it is!) 😎

This is a lot of great work. This is the most complete list I've seen. I'm not sure it scales for one person to maintain something like this.

We really need a FeatureStore which has user ratings and better discoverability. A few people have attempted to do so, but this really needs to be a PTC Onshape feature. There's already an App store for other types of add ons - that should be extended for FeatureScripts.

Part of what needs to be covered is deprecation and overlap by built in features. There are a few obvious examples like Beams which - as far as I know - is fully replaced by Frames. @EvanReese 's FaceCurves is mostly covered by Isoparametric curve (although there are still some great improvements over the built in).