Explode Lines?

S1mon

Is it just me, or are explode lines really buggy?

1. It seems like they disappear and reappear almost randomly when I open or close and exploded view and preform any edits to explode distances.
2. They also don't make a lot of sense if I try to do the explosion in disassembly-like steps. I'm used to how exploded views worked in Solidworks. You could group things and do the explosion so that animating the steps looked good. While we don't have animated explode/collapse tools in Onshape (yet?), I defaulted to doing things that way. Instead in Onshape if you create explode lines with step one, and then step two moves the part from step one further away, the explode lines from step one don't extend.
3. The line font for explode lines seems to be a suggestion. As I zoom in and out and spin around the explode lines go from solid to phantom and back. I hope when they are on a drawing that they look right.

S1mon

OK. So it seems like #3 is due to how two explode lines behave when they are on top of one another. I exploded two parts which are basically concentric rings in the same step, and naively turned on explode lines. If I go in and explicitly select one part face for the explode lines, then I get much more reasonable line font behavior (I assume it because I'm getting a single line instead of two on top of each other which are doing some sort of weird Moire thing).

This seems like a really common case that should be handled better.

eric_pesty

Yeah they can be a bit flakey...

I have found that you sometimes have to "cheat" with the order of the steps (relative to "actual" order) to get the explode lines to show up as you want. However my experience is that if you have an explode line and explode the part again, it does continue the lines (looks really cool when when doing rotations and moves etc...) so am not sure why you are not getting that behavior... do you have a specific example?

It also tends to pile several on top of each other which might be part of the display issues you are seeing in 3. For example if I have a bolt and washer, I explode the bolt with an explode line turned on but then make sure turn off the explode line for the washer. (and if you are exploding the washer and bolt together in one step, make sure to explicitly pick only the bolt rather than let it put two on top of each other).

When it comes to drawings, they can act a bit weird as well especially as they try to have always at least one "dash-dot" so that will sometimes supersede the "scale" setting when dealing with short exploded lines. They also sometimes refuse to show up altogether, or show up as a solid line (although it looks like they might have improved that recently)...

What I miss the most is a "Final" option as it's a pain to go back and edit spacing for earlier steps and not be able to see how it will mesh with subsequent ones!

shawn_crocker

I have found @eric_pesty method works better also.  I don't get good results when just leaving onshape to figure out what I want based on my order of operations.  I find it best to order the steps sensibly and manually select specific geometry to use for the explode lines reference.  I gotta say, the way onshape does explode lines I found to be a huge breath of fresh air compared to solid works.  Last I remember, solid works would allow you to choose to generate explode lines and then they would basically be a giant messy 3d sketch that did not maintain itself if the exploded view needed editing.