Can I derive parts from few tabs at once?

ben_partouch

Deriving 15 parts one by one is very time consuming. 

Thanks 

john_mcclary

No, each derive will only do one tab at a time. 

S1mon

Can I ask why you need to derive from 15 separate tabs?

Normally if I was building a part which was dependent on 15 others, they would all be in the same part studio, or perhaps they’d be in an assembly and I could use assembly contexts. 

I’m not sure what other systems you might have been using in the past, but with Solidworks’ Insert Part, or Creo’s Publish/Subscribe Geom, you wouldn’t want to reference more than a few other parts at a time. 

There’s a lot of different ways to do top down design in Onshape. Perhaps explaining a little more about what you are trying to accomplish would help us help you.

ben_partouch

Thank you for getting back to me.
Yes I can definitely explain- I'm making kitchen cabinets. Each box is a configured part. Than I need to take all these boxes to a top level part studio so I can AutoLayout all the parts for CNC machining. (This might change as I we looking into CAM that nest parts out of a 3D model). The other benefit to working in part studio for top level is that I can make changes to all the boxes at once.
I hope that make sense, Thanks.

ben_partouch

To clarify- Each box is in a separate tab to ease on re-gen time

BenTaylor

I think assembly contexts could be used for this. If you create an assembly with all the configured parts you want to lay out, you can create a part studio in context, use Transform > Copy in Place to "derive" the parts, then use AutoLayout to set them up for machining. The one downside here is that you lose the part metadata (names, part numbers, etc.) in the part studio, but they are still maintained in the assembly.

MichaelPascoe

@ben_partouch if there were some cabinet features similar to autoLayout, what kind of options and functionality would like to see in a feature?

ben_partouch

@BenTaylor I have heard about this method and tried before. It is not practical as with large assemblies it takes forever to generate. Really slow. 

@MichaelPascoe to be honest I'm trying to move away from nesting parts inside OS. Hopefully soon will have a CAM that does that.
But I would like it to be able to handle large amounts of sheets- It failed on me once working with more that 13 sheets (I need 25 and more sometimes).
Also rotating (mostly for grain direction) and flipping sides without using transform would be nice.

Thanks guys!

john_mcclary

Autolayout is a very simple nesting solution.
there is no optimization for nesting small parts within voids of larger parts.
there is no optimization for nesting two triangles together even.
I use it to get a sheet count when quoting, the low optimization tells me the maximum number of sheets required.

We use Radan and Radbend for sheet-metal.
They work pretty well.
Before that we used Mastercam which was also good.

Derive is one of the slowest features.
So, it would likely be more efficient to have a couple of parts in the single part studio if they share many features.
Then you would be able to derive once and get multiple parts from one rebuild cycle.

ben_partouch

@john_mcclary The work flow up to the derived operation is pretty set. I must make each box separately in different tabs as the boxes are heavily configured and have many parts. 

john_mcclary

Yeah, if they are configured you definitely want them separate
I get that