Improvements to Onshape - October 12, 2015

lougallo

Another update is here and we are excited to announce a number of brand new features that are making their debut today!  Two of our most popular requests, sketch image and local variables, are live in their first iteration to get some feedback in addition to a number of powerful refinements.  Let's take a look.
Highlights include:

1. NEW Sketch image - Insert a picture into a sketch as a reference.
   
   https://youtu.be/g9jmrMshs24
   
   
2. NEW Local variables - Create history-based variables for reference in Part Studios. (First phase, more expansion and capabilities to come)
   
   https://youtu.be/F9Q34jqeEjo
   
   
3.  NEW Transform with Mate connectors - Transform now has a new option to use Mate connectors to define the new orientation.
   
   https://youtu.be/iO5UTK-ZYKI
   
   
4. Wake up midpoints - Midpoints can now be used to create inferences while sketching.
   
   https://youtu.be/_qP9l9bZVtI
   
   
5. NEW Drawing tables - Insert and customize tables inside of Onshape Drawings.
   
   https://youtu.be/VDW2-h15kQ8
   
   
6. NEW Pinned Assembly comments - Now comment pinning is supported in Assemblies.
   
   
   
   
7. NEW Two direction Revolve manipulators - Now Revolve has the same manipulators for the two direction option as Extrude.
   
   
   
   
8. NEW Split surfaces - The Split tool now can split surfaces!
   
   
   
   
9. NEW Line to Point and Line to Line dimension support in Drawings.
   
   
   
   

Honorable mentions:

• Hide improvements - Hide all is now an option in Onshape for Sketches, Mates, Mate connectors and Parts.  The context menu will display the options based on the selection.

  
  
  Shortcut keys:
  -  j : Hide/show all mates
  - k : Hide/show all mate connectors
  
  
• Added 3D print materials to the Onshape standard material library
• Added a set of ANSI millimeter drawing templates to Onshape Drawings
  
  
  
  
• Support for Copy/Paste of Notes in Drawings 
• Boosted Drawing preview performance by 50%
• Deleting parts in an Assembly also removes the associated mates.

We hope that this list improves the speed and efficiency of some of your workflows and we are interested in your thoughts.  Keep the feedback coming through the forums and support.  Your input has been amazing!  Lots to do and more to come!  ~Lou

Remember: The updates listed here are now live for all users when creating new documents and over the next few days these features will also be available in documents created before the date of this update.

_Ðave_

Very nice set of improvements.

Thanks

3dcad

Parameters and transform with mate connector.. this hobby is starting to turn into work. 

Once again, a big bunch of user requested stuff was pushed in - thanks for listening.

Great work!!

brucebartlett

Great Work, about to get in and try it out. I hope split surface also works on solid faces.

3dcad

First feelings about 'local variables' feature:
- Do we need the word 'variable' in feature list #-mark is clear indicator for variable. I would prefer seeing the value for longer names than the word variable repeated.
- Please let me create 'broken' variable (with currently unknown #var in equation) and save it. I promise I will create that unknown reference above afterwards to make it work   And if I don't, make the value equal to zero.
- When I'm in dimension dialog, let me click to select parameter name from feature list instead of writing
- Search / suggest parameter names while writing (dimension dialog)
- Copy/paste variables in part studio and between part studios / documents
- Let me create new parameters in sketch mode with RMB on dimension value and select 'Create new variable from this dimension'
- When double clicking / editing var from feature list, focus on value, not name. So that I can quickly overwrite the value. 

For first stab, it's working like a charm and is really helpful for changing dimension values without opening sketch.

Tip. Create multiple variables with same name. The last one on feature list will be the actual value, suppress that and Ons will take the value before that and so on.. Very nice when comparing certain values (no need to memorize).

scott_harris

To answer Bruce's concern... Split Face has be designed to work on faces of solids and will be released soon.

viru

Thanks for the great sets of improvements!
Now due to boosted drawing preview performance I can create drawing much faster. Introduction of Transform with Mate connectors and shortcuts key for hiding and showing mates/ mate connectors is great innovation.

shashank_aarya

Thanks for the great update! New local variable tool is awesome! It is very helpful when it is required to control the design by changing the limited dimensions without going into the multiple sketches.

peter_hall

Good update some useful new features. One question: Does anyone know an approx date for any release of either sheet metal or welding/fabrication environments (both good parts of Solidworks)? The lack of these limits my workflow greatly and prevents me from any pro commitment to Onshape. thanks.

joris_kofman

great features in so short time.

one thing that i find frustrating is what happens when renaming a variable: all features based on this variable stop working, so you have do re-do all the features where the variable is used.

one could introduce a dropdown menu containing all the defined variables as soon as the # character is entered into an input box. 

Narayan_K

@ joris_kofman, we can't rename the variable.we can only edit the input value.
Drop down menu is a good suggestion.Instead of scrolling to top in the feature tree, it will help.

joris_kofman

Narayan_K said:

@ joris_kofman, we can't rename the variable.we can only edit the input value.

yes you can edit the name of the variable as well. I did this and it broke the references to the variable in the model

Narayan_K

@ joris_kofman ,Now i understood your point.Definitely there is a update required.

clayton_ertley

Good addition to surface modeling! I can wait to see where it goes. I got into this program because of similar work flow to Solidworks but because of the price I had to use Rhino, which I came to love and uses a lot of surface modeling.

After all the bells and whistle are finally added you guys may want to think about adding a kind of free-form design "mode" as Onshape is clearly moving in the "design intent" direction. Free-form allows for much more creativity and supporting both ways would be new-ish in CAD modeling.It could aslo help you to curb your market by having something to offer to multiple types of modelers. The real all in one package!

Great work guys! I am loving the way these updates are moving along!

michał_1

Jaw drop...sketch image finally

driesvervoort

This is a very fine update!

Dries

andrew_troup

Thanks for another useful release; it's good to see a range of areas being addressed.

I really like what seems like a strong focus on incremental improvements to existing capability.

I guess I have to confess to being concerned at the prospect of Onshape opening up further major capability areas, such as requested above, when there remains so much to do to make several important existing capabilities viable (I'm thinking particularly of surfaces and drawings)

It seems to me there's a potential for the development resource to be spread increasingly thinly, (I'm sure we all remember how disastrous it proved, to renege on the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact ) and I hope that the example of drawings would serve to stiffen Onshape's resolve not to bow prematurely to user pressure when deciding when to push new major capability areas online.

It's evident that crucial additions to basic drawing capability are still happening very slowly and I personally would be disappointed to see the rate of progress stay the same, let alone be slowed by further dilution of effort. While I realise that the development team for drawings is external, I wonder if this is a problematic degree of offshoring, and I would like to see more direct involvement from Onshape in setting the interface and incorporating existing toolsets (particularly in the sketching and constraints areas) into the drawing package.

At present, it seems to me a bit like a groundbreaking piece of futuristic US automotive engineering with the design of an important subsystem, and the user interface for that subsystem, outsourced to (say)  Citroen. The latter has "form" when it comes to futuristic and groundbreaking, but there can still be a mismatch on matters of substance. 

Enough of that, and sorry about the soapbox rant .... so here's another positive observation: Rightly or wrongly, I'm guessing (from the inclusion in this list of the addition of manipulators to the existing capability to revolve in two directions unequally) that we are being told about ALL changes; sometimes in the past it has seemed that minor changes were sneaking in unannounced, and it seems to me that made it harder for a user to keep abreast, in the dynamic development environment of Onshape.  

billy2

translate by mate connector, cool! Thanks

alan_89

Great progress yet again!

But i have to agree drawings are still needing quite a bit of work in terms of performance and functionality.

As far as adding more dimension types to drawings its great to have options but i'm hoping that ultimately there will be a "Smart" Dimension that handles most situations and then the option (ideally on RMB) that allows you to switch to one of the specific types for that pesky dimension you can't quite grab.

Having to select many different types of dimension just isn't very user friendly. In the short term just adding more to the right click context menu would be handy to stop having to revisit the menus. 

paul_britton

Great new improvements, especially like the addition of Variables. 

Just need to be able to have variables with a scope of more than one Part Studio now.... or I need to learn to structure my designs so that everything is in one Part Studio.

Does anyone have a 'trick' to allow a variable value to be propagated through multiple Part Studios? ie if I'm drawing a lasercut MDF kit and I have a #PanelThickness variable (say 6mm), that defines the material thickness I'm using, how can I get that value into each part studio of sub components, so that I can change it in one place and all my tabs and slots etc adjust automagically?

pete_yodis

scott_harris said:

To answer Bruce's concern... Split Face has be designed to work on faces of solids and will be released soon.

Great news @scott_harris .  This area is important to me with metal casting and plastic part design.  I'm sure others feel the same.

The new sketch picture is very timely.  I have an image (satellite photo) that I want to overlay on a property layout this week.  It's the 2nd time an update has come for me in the very week I really needed it.  Derived part was the last feature that was added (august) when I really needed it.  Kudos.

lougallo

@joris_kofman In this first release we had not put in the drop down.  We hope to add more refinements over the coming releases but wanted to get you all the feature set now.  More work to do and glad you like what you see so far..

lougallo

paul_britton said:

Great new improvements, especially like the addition of Variables. 

Just need to be able to have variables with a scope of more than one Part Studio now.... or I need to learn to structure my designs so that everything is in one Part Studio.

Does anyone have a 'trick' to allow a variable value to be propagated through multiple Part Studios? ie if I'm drawing a lasercut MDF kit and I have a #PanelThickness variable (say 6mm), that defines the material thickness I'm using, how can I get that value into each part studio of sub components, so that I can change it in one place and all my tabs and slots etc adjust automagically?

@paul_britton Globalizing variables is on the radar and we will iterate on variables more in the coming releases.

nav

paul_britton said:

Does anyone have a 'trick' to allow a variable value to be propagated through multiple Part Studios? ie if I'm drawing a lasercut MDF kit and I have a #PanelThickness variable (say 6mm), that defines the material thickness I'm using, how can I get that value into each part studio of sub components, so that I can change it in one place and all my tabs and slots etc adjust automagically?

This could be one approach using derived sketches+Plane Line point:

philip_thomas

Clever

andrew_troup

Ingenious indeed. Nice skills there, @nav!

andrew_troup

This highlights just how useful it would be to add the "Up to Vertex" end condition to extrudes and revolves in Onshape; it would eliminate the need for creating an extra "Line-Point" construction plane in each of @nav 's Part Studios.

joris_kofman

why not just do a multipart model and not have to do all the deriving, constraining and sketching?

simply create all the parts in one part studio, you can bypass all the workarounds (for modeling that is, some other problems persist, see my post on the subject)

andrew_troup

@joris_kofman
If the parts have already been modelled, your suggestion would require remodelling them.
And the management of multipart studios can be problematic under some circumstances; it can be a lot easier if parts destined for certain outcomes or output can be grouped by tab, for instance.

3dcad

What if you first create / import all parts into same studio (=originals) and then derive parts into separate studios for perfect grouping.

bill_schnoebelen

FYI:

Just tried sketch image with a cell phone picture. My image was deformed. I think this is due to the angle of the camera lens.

I scanned the same part and it was a hole lot closer.

I don't think either will beat measuring on the mill.