Improvements to Onshape - April 12th, 2023

S1mon

Thanks to the Onshape developers. It's great to see these 3 requests finished. Isn't the best part of a sprint getting to mark things done?

@GregBrown I'd almost forgotten that I wrote the Face-Face fillet IR. Very happy to see it finished with all the controls.

wout_theelen541

I like the ability to hide sketches and the easy switching to tangent arcs. The thin extrude and helix options gave me an idea, why not add some standard profiles to the sweep tool? Or perhaps even add an option to add your own sketch profiles like in the frame tool?
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/a2579ea69458709b3a099ede/w/196e9edd929c241311ef4d0e/e/479455d4cf0914d9d83749ff

david_littlefair373

Thin Extrude is a VERY welcome feature, & one that has taken far too long to be implemented.

mike_hölscher

I can't believe it. My Improvement Request from June 2017. It's...actually...here... 
And it's my birthday in 3 days! Best CAD-present everrrr.

jelte_steur814

whoa this is a big one! very happy with all these requested features being implemented and particularly Face Blend looks very powerful.
also super sweep seems sweet! something to play around with!
Thank you OS team!

philippe_marin788

nick_papageorge073 said:

Nice job:)

Where is the Super Sweep FS? I just tried searching for it and came up empty. That twisting option shown towards the end of the video will help with a ribbon cable wiring representation I was trying to model a few weeks ago. Thanks.

A lot of amazing improvements in this release. Thanks to developers.
But it is always a mess for me to find a FeatureScript. They are mixed in numerous public FS and I don't find the good way to sort the good ones. In fact they are even mixed with a lot of copies included in various other Documents, and I don't find the original ones with potential pdf explanations.
For example "Approximate Spline" was not found, or another script;
"Super Sweep" not found;
"Parametric Curve" found but without the "Approximate" option.
--> Is there a way to find the most official FeatureScripts? Are the ones cited here all easy to find somewhere?
Thanks for your help

MichaelPascoe

These are some serious improvements. I use lots of software and not one of them gives quality improvements like you guys do.
Thanks Onshape team!

Pattabi_Kakumanu

Thanks Onshape team! Great job on the new updates.

Rhett_Robinson

Very excited to dig into face blend!

greg_geldard

I have no "Faceblend" dropdown? Anyone else not have it yet?

Lucas_Kuhns

greg_geldard said:

I have no "Faceblend" dropdown? Anyone else not have it yet?

I have it on some documents but not others. When I open a document that doesn't have it yet, I get a notification popup in the top-right area that has this notice:

john_mcclary

That just means they haven't been updated to the latest release of Onshape yet. Usually happens on documents that haven't been opened for a long time. So they are low priority to use resorces to push an update. 

You can ignore it if you need to work quick, otherwise upgrade now, then it will kick you out while it updates, usually 5minutes or so, then you can go back into the document 

Marc_Miller

This update has some really nice additions. Excellent OS team!

Axel_Kollmenter

Thank you! Finally the "arc-hover" feature is implemented

emagdalenaC2i

En este enlace podéis ver las Novedades de Onshape en español:
https://youtu.be/_MrUzIw-6r8

ilya_baran

Let me answer some approximateSpline questions.

@venkatramana_reddy Simon is correct -- you can use the first and second derivative options to match curvature/tangency to a surface.  Note that we do automatic rescaling, so you can provide a normalized tangent direction as the first derivative and an orthogonal vector whose length is the curvature (in 1/m) as the second derivative.

@S1mon The endpoints and derivatives are treated as hard constraints (except for periodic fits).  Under the hood for approximateSpline, we do sort of the "expected" thing -- compute assumed parameters for the input points (a future version will allow specifying them, which can sometimes help get a lighter approximation), and then assign knots based on curvature and do a least squares fit.  Repeat the knot assignment and fit with more knots until the tolerance is reached.

@nick_papageorge073 @philippe_marin788
The demoed sweep just that -- a demo, nowhere close to handling all the cases that need to be handled for production use.
Parametric curve is owned by @mahir, so it'll use the new code when/if he updates it.

Here are code snippets for the curve approximation and the sweep (my versions, not exactly what Neil used) -- just providing them as examples, deliberately not as custom features:  https://cad.onshape.com/documents/03c52c3726286054bcd64637/w/8c75bcf4c9ec344ec6e3fb15/e/f3db28f74d419c5e269d1446

I definitely hear everyone on the "joy" of searching for custom features.  We're working on a couple of directions to make this less painful -- stay tuned.

Alex_Pitt

Great Job Onshape Team! All very nice quality-of-life improvements. Thin Extrude is especially welcome for me.

NeilCooke

@S1mon - sorry for the late reply, I was on a well deserved vacation! Below is the Document I used for the demo. To echo what @ilya_baran said, this Document is provided as-is to demonstrate different use case examples of the approximateSpline function just so you can see how it could be used. These are not intended to be production quality custom features and will not be maintained.

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/5e7b129d3112105f68f9ed86

hayes_megee

the face blend tool looks great! maybe next update we could get a create polyhedron where you can enter a scale and how many sides you want.

Konst_Sh

Would be nice to have more documentation around approximateSpline(), currently it doesn't even says array of which values it returns (as I found it is an array of b-spline definitions, but it would be a struggle for newbies).

Also what causes the requirement for approximation targets to have equal number of position points? Is for synchronizing parametrization of resulting bSpline definitions?

NeilCooke

Konst_Sh said:

Also what causes the requirement for approximation targets to have equal number of position points? Is for synchronizing parametrization of resulting bSpline definitions?

Yes

S1mon

@hayes_megee
There's this polyhedra FeatureScript:



https://cad.onshape.com/documents/2c40f522f1b5a02f6ce9ce01/w/32e0799ad10a8f40ac24abb5/e/dd23a5b64fbc7cefbf67ffbd

philippe_marin788

Hi all, 
Speaking of Feature Scripts, I discovered a few days ago "Auto Layout" which is really useful for cutting sheet metal objects flat patterns (laser cutter or water jet).
But the question is: would it be possible to export the layout contours in one consistent dxf file?

alnis

@philippe_marin788 here's a clip from my laser cutting tutorial on YouTube that goes over exporting the results of the Auto Layout custom feature as a DXF: https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxESq8NBFkwilQmuR1eIydWZEIIHUiwBWz

Please let me know if it opens correctly for you! I'm still pretty new to sharing clips from YouTube.

chris_powell497

New update but still no advancement with SVGs...

Marc_Miller

chris_powell497 said:

New update but still no advancement with SVGs...

What sort of things are you looking for with SVG files? Import or export related? Something with colors, joined curves, ??

philippe_marin788

alnis said:

@philippe_marin788 here's a clip from my laser cutting tutorial on YouTube that goes over exporting the results of the Auto Layout custom feature as a DXF: https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxESq8NBFkwilQmuR1eIydWZEIIHUiwBWz

Please let me know if it opens correctly for you! I'm still pretty new to sharing clips from YouTube.

Yes perfect it helps! 
The other way I found was to create a new sketch, and project every edge of the relevant faces onto the sketch plane by the function "Use", then export the sketch content as DXF. The tricky thing is to select all edges properly. I feel the path you propose is far more reliable. Thanks. 
 
Nevertheless, extending the "Export as DXF/DWG" function so that it would allow selection of multiple faces would be a great improvement. I asked the developers, and they say they will decide if this is to be developed or not. Don't hesitate to also request so that they understand I'm not the only one waiting for this feature improvement ;-) 

Dean_Gardner

When can access the new face blend tool?

NeilCooke

Dean_Gardner said:

When can access the new face blend tool?

Please see the footnote of the main post:

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.

If the Version and history graph says "Automatic update" then you should be ready to go. 

pmc_pmc

Rolling ball!

A while ago I spent some time trying to construct such fillets between compound curved surfaces and gave up.