Sheet Metal Model / Convert Should Recognize Fillets Automatically

S1mon

If I start with a model that has fillets and convert to sheet metal, it can either select a whole surface and "convert" or use "thicken" and tangent propagation to find all the connected surfaces, but it doesn't convert those fillets to bends without me selecting each filleted "cylinder". It makes conversion take more picks than necessary. It would be nice if all the cylindrical surfaces were selected by default, and I could remove any if necessary (still trying to figure out why I would...). Coming from Solidworks, this is what I would expect.

Cylinder is a weird term here BTW. It took me a while to understand that applies to fillets. I assumed cylinder means a full 360 rotation.

john_mcclary

A cylinder surface is any surface that can be extruded from an arc or circle. Even if you take a soup can and cut a square window out of it. That face would still be considered a cylinder face.

You need to select the bend faces as well because those are stored in a separate list of bend edges. Sometimes I'll use delete face to remove the bends and use my own bend table to decide the metal thickness and bend radius.

It would be nice if it could automatically convert to sheet-metal intelligently. Perhaps someone could write a featurescript which allows selecting a single surface for an input, then automatically finds tangent faces, and automatically makes any touched cylindrical surfaces bend entities.. . 

S1mon

I understand mathematically what a cylindrical surface is, but somehow the way the dialog is written I thought that it was referring to a full cylinder for some reason. As a user, the dialog is confusing. I wasted a lot of time recreating bends and manually modify them to match some imported geometry when I could have just used the cylinder option. Even in the best case, it still requires a click per bend to tell Onshape that I want a real bend there, not some useless "other joints".

Solidworks has a "collect bends" which does exactly what I was hoping for here. One click, and it finds all the bends tangentially connected to the starting face. Although if the referenced geometry changes, the "collect bends" needs to be redone, which always struck me as annoying. It's been a long time since I've done any sheet metal in Pro-E/Creo. but I remember it was much better about creating selections as a heuristic, not a one time thing.