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Improvements to Onshape - February 3rd, 2023
mlaflecheCAD
Member, Onshape Employees, Developers Posts: 178 
PART STUDIOS
BOUNDARY SURFACE
The Boundary Surface feature puts high quality surfacing into the hands of all Onshape users. The Boundary Surface approach uses sets of curves from each direction (the U and V direction) to form a 4-sided, closed surface, with options to specify boundary conditions such as tangency matching, normal to profile, etc...
CONTROL POINT GRID
A new option has been added to the Curve and Surface Analysis tool that displays a Control Point Grid that is useful for understanding the defining geometry of a spline surface.
MEASUREMENT OF ANGLES FOR CURVES AND FACES
When defining a surface, it is essential to know at what angle a curve or surface is intersecting another group of curves or surfaces. Note how the selection is possible between curves and surfaces that displays the angle numerically and graphically on-screen.
EXTRUDE DIRECTION
When performing an extrusion, the direction of an extrude can be defined using planes, lines and mate connectors. This improvement will facilitate the creation of geometry previously tricky to build with a single feature.
EXTRUDE OFFSET
To set the distance from the sketch plane when creating extrusions, an option is provided to select an offset to the starting direction of an extrusion as you create it—reducing the amount of reference geometry needed to create the same geometry.
CUSTOMIZE THE "S" KEY SHORTCUT TOOLBAR WITH CUSTOM FEATURES
Now all your favorite Custom Features can be added to your "S" key custom popup toolbar!
ASSEMBLIES
ASSEMBLY MATE FOLDERS
You can use Folders to store groups of mates, helping to organize mates for use when creating assemblies. Organized mates can be helpful when managing configurations, named positions, simulations, and more.
REORDER SIMULATION STUDIES
Use context menus on Simulation Studies to move right or left for better organization.
DRAWINGS
HATCH REGION
Dynamically created hatch regions are available in drawings with a pre-defined region or with new sketch geometry created on the fly.
HATCH STYLE PANEL
Use the Style Panel to edit one or more hatch patterns on the drawing.
INSPECTION REPORTING CALCULATES LIMITS
Inspection items in Onshape Drawings will auto-calculate the upper and lower bounds for all bubbled dimensions for your inspection reporting needs.PDM
CLONE PUBLICATION
A Publication can be cloned to allow for sharing of similar data with the extended design. Use cases include sharing a publication that includes different versions and revisions of data, sharing with a different group of users and more.
GENERAL TASK INSIDE A DOCUMENT
In addition to creating General Tasks from the Action Items screen (found under your profile picture menu or the Action Items tab across the top the screen in the Enterprise version), access Tasks inside a document by right-clicking on a tab or part/assembly. Tasks created in this manner automatically reference the selected entity.
EXPORT ITEMS TO A CSV
Items from company settings can now be downloaded as a CSV directly from the Company options. This allows for more flexible management of bulk items so that administrators can share this data with other business systems.
ENTERPRISE DASHBOARD UPDATE - MODELING TIME BY USER OVER TIME
FEATURESCRIPT
Several ease of use improvements have been introduced to FeatureScript.OPEN LINKED DOCUMENT FOR IMPORT REFERENCES
CTRL-click or CMD-click on a Mac now hyperlinks to and opens a new browser tab to the Import reference being called.PROFILER IMPROVEMENTS
AUTOCOMPLETE AWARE OF `->` PARAMETER
When using the arrow functions, autocomplete previously added in the first parameter, which gets in the way when chaining functions like queries together. This improvement handles the first parameter or not depending on whether it is in the expression chain.SHOW LOCAL VARIABLES FIRST
Local variables will now show up at top of autocomplete menu for convenience.ANDROID
EXTERNAL REFERENCES
For assemblies made with Linked Document references, export operations are allowed (as long as the export permission is allowed) from an Android device.
LEARNING CENTER
VIDEO UPDATES
A couple more videos have been updated in the Learning Center:Frames Fundamentals course
New video on adding Gussets to frame parts.Advanced Part Design course
New video on partial fillets.Please take a moment to try out these new features and improvements and leave your comments below. For a detailed list of all the changes in this update, please see the changelog.
Remember: The updates listed here are now live for all users when creating new Documents. Over the next few days, these features will also be available in Documents created before this update.
Comments
I unfortunately do very little surfacing so I will miss out on some of these... I think the folders for mates are going to be my favourite from this round (been wishing for these for a while, especially since mates aren't automatically named after something useful and it gets tedious renaming them, at least we can now dump "related" mates in a folder to make it way easier to navigate...)!
The extrude tool refinements will be nice as there are some cases where the "other end direction" couldn't quite achieve the same as the offset. I was hoping for an "extrude thin" (a tab between solid and surface...) but I guess it's not that big a deal (yes, I know there's a custom feature somewhere that has that but I don't really want to use a "special" extrude...)
Twitter: @onshapetricks & @babart1977
Folders for mate connectors are very usefuly for big assemblies
Here are two sketched curves (on parallel planes) which are both degree 3 Béziers.
I create a very simple Boundary surface using these two curves and I get this:
It clearly rebuilds the two end curves to be 2 span, degree 3 B-splines (in U), and a nice degree 3 in V. In the middle, the U curvature is not G3. This seems bizarre. This is such a simple surface to get right.
Lofting with the same curves and constraints actually yields a much better result, even though it rebuilds the input curves with more density than Boundary:
I will definitely have to do a lot more investigation. Much like in Solidworks, there are times when its Boundary surface is better than Loft, and vice versa. The really great thing is that Onshape is giving us better analysis tools than many other CAD programs. I would often export critical surfaces out of Solidworks and look at them in Rhino, but with all the upgrades to Onshape's analysis tools, the only thing I'd still love to see is a built in environment map option.
[Edit]
On a little further investigation, I wonder how much of this could be an artifact of the U/V curvature analysis itself. Looking at zebras, or Gaussian, or mean, I can't detect any hint of the issues I see in the U-curvature. Hmmmmm.
Overall this will be very useful, but it's interesting what is not included right now:
- Boundary doesn't have guide curves in the middle of a surface like Loft or Fill
- Boundary doesn't allow curvature constraints like Loft or Fill
I suspect that these are in the works for a later update.If you use Boundary surface with just two U curves, and add tangency constraints, the V curves at the edges are very different than Loft. They aren't exactly what I would expect. Solidworks has some advanced tools to control how these edges are created, and I expect that something like that will show up in Onshape some day.
The great thing about seeing the control point grid is you can really see the results of building similar surfaces with Boundary, Loft and Fill. Depending on your needs one might be much better than the others. Sometimes Fill is producing a more well behaved, less dense control point layout than Boundary or Loft.
Here are the "same" transition surface built between two orthogonal extruded surfaces (from degree-3 Bézier sketches) with curvature continuous Bridging curves on the sides.
Boundary does a decent job, but there's no curvature option, it rebuilds the U curves, and I'm not sure I like the way the parameterization happens in the middle:
Loft has "Match curvature" but it has some horrible bunching of CVs on the edges. This kind of thing is fine for a single surface, but if you build a lot of things off of intersections or extensions of these edges, you may start to have weird wobbles or failures.
Fill has a curvature option, and it builds a surface without rebuilding either the U or the V inputs! In this particular case, I would choose Fill.
To address some very high level points you made - yes, the Boundary surface, Loft and Fill will behave differently, as their underlying intent (and mathematics!) is different. There is no one perfect feature, so having more options to cover all possible situations is the idea here. In some cases, Loft, Fill, or Boundary surf may give the result you desire, and in that case is the best choice.
That being said, we are striving to make each of these features (as you've seen over the past number of releases where improvements have been made) better. We of course don't talk about futures here, or forecast any release targets for improvements, but suffice to say we are not done with Boundary surface...
In fact if you have not already signed up for the Onshape Live event, then it might be a good idea - we do have a session on Sneak Peeks, and I invite everyone to come along and even participate in the Q&A with the people developing all this great stuff.
Think of a generic surface as being a thin sheet of rectangular rubber or wire mesh. They can be stretched or formed into 3D shapes, but they want to stay 4 sided. If you draw a grid on the flat sheet of material, one axis is called U, and the other is V. The two edges of U are “parallel” (in the theoretical flattened version) and the two edges of V are “parallel”.
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EXTRUDE OFFSET thank you!!
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