3D Sketching

shawnrw

Does anybody know if there are any plans to integrate a true 3D sketch capability into Onshape similar to SolidWorks in the near future? 

I know 3D sketching can be somewhat replicated with planes, mate connectors, etc., but it's very time consuming compared to SolidWorks offering. We are looking to convert our remaining Solidworks accounts, but this seems to be a feature we can't live without.

Thanks

EvanReese

I feel your pain. That's part of why I wrote the Freeform Spline custom feature, which can alleviate some of the lack I feel, but I do think it's a temporary solution to tide me over until something more robust is rolled out natively.

shawnrw

Wow, what a great job on that feature, super helpful... You should charge for that :-).

dirk_van_der_vaart

@Evan_Reese
When you could add an option to use a line or arc instead of the spline then 3d sketching is very close???

MichaelPascoe

@Evan_Reese
That would be a lot of work, but I could see Freeform Spline morphing into 3D Sketch.

Freeform is the best feature yet for 3D adjustability.

EvanReese

dirk_van_der_vaart said:

@Evan_Reese
When you could add an option to use a line or arc instead of the spline then 3d sketching is very close???

If the workflow is 1 curve per feature (as with Freeform Spline) then it's already pretty close. a 2-point spline can be used as a line. It doesn't do true arcs, but a 3 or 4 point spline could be close. Are there parts of your workflow where you'd need a real arc in 3D or could a spline do the trick? I don't think I've ever needed the arc, personally.

EvanReese

MichaelPascoe said:

@Evan_Reese
That would be a lot of work, but I could see Freeform Spline morphing into 3D Sketch.

Freeform is the best feature yet for 3D adjustability.

I suppose it could move that way. If I'm going to spend more time on it, I'd really like to just make it a better spline tool. If I can figure out how to pick multiple points at once, or automatically activate the query field of the selected point, or improve performance, I'd sooner do that.

I'm so glad you're finding it useful.

The main point here is that 3D sketching or something similar would be super useful, and I hope Onshape develops it as a native function soon.

EvanReese

shawnrw said:

Wow, what a great job on that feature, super helpful... You should charge for that :-).

Thanks! I don't think there's a good way to charge for custom features yet, but on the flip side, it means I get to use a ton of other awesome ones for free and learn from their code too so I think I'm good with the trade-off. Of course, you're welcome to send a fruit basket or something.

WaldPinkler

I started with onshape, I've been playing around with solidworks because of the simulation aspect. I noticed the 3D sketching and that makes some things much easier than spending time with bridging/projected curves and such. I really like that in Solidworks. Onshape interface is much nicer though and I can simple things done easily.

shawnrw

This is the only missing feature that is stopping us from leaving Solidworks completely, sadly I don't believe it's a real priority for Onshape. There are some tricks, nicely done features scripts, etc. that you can use, but they are very time-consuming compared to the ease of 3D sketching, especially for advanced surfacing.

It's a been a high ranking improvement request for year's now, see link below. Vote and hope!

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/3369/3d-sketching-curves/p1

S1mon

I don't have any inside details on 3D sketcher, but I suspect it's in development, but has been a much bigger job than we can imagine. I miss it a lot from Solidworks, but my experience was that the 3D constraint solver in SWX was much less robust than the 2D solver. It often felt that once you got beyond very simple orthogonal sketched lines, that 3D sketcher would blow up (constraints would all turn red) if you just poked a sketch wrong. Considering that Onshape's collaboration is predicated on there always being only one solution given a set of feature steps, robustness and consistency is essential.