Viewport Improvements

LKRENZLER

One of my least favourite things about Onshape is the viewport.  The black lines and the highlight lines are WAY too thick (double what they should be).  It makes it hard to see detail.  The super thick yellow highlight edges are very distracting.  The ambient occlusion is far too soft.  It makes the whole display look out of focus.  If some people like it this way then at least offer adjustments.  It makes Onshape look like a non-professional toy and hard on the eyes over time.  Take a look at Ansys Discovery or Blender to see how it should be done.  Also, I can export a complex scene with extreme tessellation to Blender and still get 100X the frame rate.  It's open source so take a look at what they're doing for ideas.  And please, offer a dark theme.  White screens are hard on the eyes after a long day!

LKRENZLER

One thing I think really hurts Onshape performance in this area is that it is constantly re-tesselating geometry to reduce complexity when navigating.  This is not necessary for modern graphics cards that can easily handle a lot of geometry and in fact, is quite harmful as the viewport hesitates every time there's a change in the tesselation.  Perhaps very old or low powered devices need it but please put in an option to turn it off.

LKRENZLER

Here is an example from Ansys Discovery as a comparison.  So much easier to look at for long periods and easier to see fine detail.

john_mcclary

If you see tessellation, that means you're computer needed the quality to be reduced to maintain a quick experience.
I think the performance bar has been set quite low to have an overall similar experience on lesser hardware as the top dollar work stations.
This reduces the overhead on computer requirements, which plays into  the cost savings of switching to Onshape.

I agree it seems to go a bit overboard as far as how jagged it makes some stuff. But you can always edit the tessellation quality of your parts from the appearance tab. They are set to "auto" by default.

The tessellation generation does not slow down anything. It only makes things quicker (Trust me, I was around before this was fully implemented).
It does it by giving  you a rough image quickly, then slowly improving it during idle processor time. In large assemblies this is a good thing for sure.

I also agree that the tangent lines are a bit cartoony, but I've grown to like the overall look of models in Onshape. But this is a personal preference that you can't win when it is a universal option.
The best we can do is create an improvement request for a user-level option for tessellation quality and line thicknesses.

On that note, I wouldn't mind having a slider in options.
That way if you have a preference you can tune your experience better.

Something like this:
Performance { --------------|--- } Quality

Speaking of which, let's say there is a slider like that controlled by Onshape, I think it feels more like this currently based off large assemblies I've had in both Onshape and SolidWorks:
Performance { ----|------------- } Quality

LKRENZLER

I have to disagree about the auto tesselation.  It's clearly doing it when it does not need to and every time it does, it causes a hesitation.  Inventor had this problem and they finally put a button in to turn it off.  It was a huge improvement IF you're using a reasonable graphics card.  If they need to change tesselation with current graphics cards they're doing something wrong.  I can put the same assembly into Blender as an example and subdivide it to crazy tesselation levels and it still outperforms by a huge margin.  Not even in the same ballpark.  It's shocking.  This display feels like it's from the '90's.  A little bit of complexity and it bogs down.

Having sliders for these things would be nice for sure.