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Virtual sharps
mikael_nylund
Member Posts: 4 ✭
Hi. One feature that is very helpful when setting out dimensions on a drawings where there's many angles and fillets.
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you can create an improvement request up for public voting. If it gets many votes it will get higher priority in development and you will be noted when this feature is implemented.
It would work perfectly well for allocating major, bolt-on functionality like GD&T, but I think it that to flood it with essential detail (like virtual sharps) would bring it to its knees.
It's already an open question whether drawing IRs should be jumbled into the modeller list; it's getting increasingly hard for even dedicated users to keep track of what has and what has not been requested.
It seems to me there are literally hundreds of "essential detail" items like virtual sharps, and when I think back to (say) Solidworks 2003, it had about 97% of them. Whereas it seems to me Onshape Drawings has maybe a tenth of them.
How many of them are needed to be able to produce industry-quality drawings? All of them, pretty much. So I don't think it is helpful to expect the user to provide guidance as to what order to code them in: that's a development management issue.
Unlike modelling, which involves literal depictions of reality (and where past a certain stage of software development, an ingenious user can generally come up with some sort of 'near enough' workaround for missing functionality), drawings are a highly symbolic language.
Wherever symbols are substituted for literal depictions of reality, ambiguity becomes a major challenge (as any bored schoolboy can confirm: "what is the poet trying to tell us here, Mr Troup?" and the unspoken reply "How the .... do you expect me to know that?")
... and historically, ambiguity in drawings was resolved by skilled use of a simple tool (pencil or pen), at the disposal of a complex intelligence, employed to add drawing elements limited only by imagination and convention.
Virtual sharps are just one indispensable element for eliminating ambiguity.
Sometimes these are also referred to as Theoretical Sharp Corners as well. As Neil mentioned they can be nice for someone programming the tool path (although not absolutely necessary in a lot of cases), but for inspection with calipers on the shop floor... not gonna happen. With modern CMM equipment if you take enough hits on the surfaces, CMM software can determine where intersecting surfaces meet (they are surfaces on a real physical part and not lines on a drawing). It generally slows down the inspection process, although it is technically possible. Usually there is a better way to qualify geometry, but sometimes this might be the only way. A drawing usually needs to consider the needs for the design, the needs for the person making it, and also the needs for someone inspecting it. Placing the dimensions to virtual sharps as reference dimensions would be nice for manufacturing and also not require inspection to qualify these reference dimensions... a nice mix.