IM DONE

ninja_akiyama

i have tried so hard to use this software and its just unusable i have found better 3d software that doesn't need to be this difficult to operate. I am pretty good with most top end design programs but this is awful. I wanted to make this discussion cause i found my experience so bad. I have gone through a large number of tutorials and im still majorly stuck on such simple tasks. It should be this clunky to move and use what are simple objects. As the title suggests im done with this im going on to a much better more straight forward platform. his whole thing needs we doing from start to finish its horrible to use and i refuse to continue using something that make me feel depressed and frustrated just trying to move a shape. Unbelievable..??????    

NeilCooke

Interested to know what "top end design programs" you are referring to? 

Ste_Wilson

Why do you need to 'move a shape'?  What's your end goal? It sounds like you are expecting different things. You can define the position of parts in relation to other parts, either as a multipart part studio or in an assembly.  In an assembly, you can use mates to define the type of motion one part can have relative to another and then animate it.  What other software are you going to use?

Rhett_Robinson

Interesting that you only joined 3 days ago and have given up stating Onshape is unusable. Not sure what design programs you are talking about, but if you are familiar with parametric software there shouldn't be any issue besides the differences in Onshape's document structure. Do you have an example of what you have been trying to do?

_anton

Sounds like you expected a mesh modeler. Parametric CAD in general employs a very different paradigm; rather than starting with polygons and moving them around, you design your parts in their final size from the start. If you want to change something, you change the relevant feature and your entire part studio regenerates. The features are the "definition"; then we regenerate them to produce your parts.

While parametric CAD may feel less free-flowing than the Blender/Modo/Max/C4D experience, you gain the ability to make very high-level changes without redoing your entire model. It's well worth learning, even if it seems hard at the start.

outstanding

@ninja_akiyama
I want to pitch in because my experience - now on week 3 - with Onshape is so opposite to yours. I've become ...looking for word... thrilled with the possibilities, ease of use, value of tutorials and documentation. I can not state anything not to like about Onshape.

>just trying to move a shape

This might be the key to your worries. Coming from Fusion 360 (among other things) I also visited this stage. One just cannot. Then again, one of the technical frustrations I had with said CAD tool is that whenever I stored the position, all hell went lose on the parameteric side. It didn't fit in in the paradigm, and in my opinion Onshape does the right thing by not storing positions in the Part Studio side.

As to assembly, there you can. Tutorials show how. (if interested and still giving Onshape a chance, ask me directly).

As to giving feedback: next time, give more details like others have already asked - which products are you used to use etc. This helps people see your frustration, instead of just reading a flaming message. If you re-read your post, there's hardly anything to anchor it.

steve_shubin

So you say the program is clunky to move objects

Makes me think that you’re not talking about one of the digital clay sculpting apps where you are massaging high polygon count meshes. Programs like this are typically used for making some type of a person. For organic shapes.

Your statement leads me to believe that you’re probably talking about what is known as a DIRECT MODELER, probably something without any kind of history / feature tree, to where if you make a mistake, then you may have to do NUMEROUS UNDO’s to get to a point where you can start forward progress again

Direct modelers are pretty cool in that they do seem to be more no-brainer in the early learning stages. A matter of pushing and pulling, and that kind of thing.

But when you start to get into a project quite a ways, and then you find out that something is out of whack, and you realize that you’re going to have to redo numerous parts, well then that type of program could be a pain to work with

A lot of vector / CAD programs make it way way too easy to move something accidentally, without your knowing. Not good 

I’ll give you a situation that I was just dealing with

I try and take time to be up on things. So I was curious about a program to see what it’s all about. Tried going through a tutorial for it yesterday.

It’s a direct modeler.

Now I took my time to watch the video very very carefully. Even slowed the video down as much as 50% to make sure that nothing was getting by me. I paused the video who knows how many times. I backed up the video. And I kept going over things to make sure that I was fully understanding exactly what was being shown and said. And if I needed to, I could turn on captioning to make sure I was hearing exactly what the person was saying.

One of the things that I had to do was to resize a door on all four edges to reduce it by 2 mm going all the way around so it was 4 mm narrower than the original and 4 mm shorter in height than the original

Now, in the past, when I was working for a paycheck in construction management, I could be quite the stickler for making sure that every jot and tittle was to be paid attention to and carried out.

So I gave this little project every bit as much attention, if not more so. And yet, one of those faces running around the exterior of this slab door, failed to be in the proper position.

So I go to make a drawer based off of this erroneous part, and when I went to do a mirror, I noticed that things were out of whack

Now I could’ve tried to move this face and that face and went back and checked dimension, after dimension, after dimension, and offset, after offset, but that just ain’t the way I like to work.

So I deleted something like three or four parts to get back to a point where I was able to get that one face of the door pushed in by 2 mm, and then I decided to start forward progress again from there.

That’s a lousy way of doing things in my opinion

Now, that wasn’t the only problem I encountered. I found other shortfalls with this program that I surely was not crazy about.

With a program like that, you’re really never quite sure that everything is exactly where it should be.

Especially if you’re dealing with minute (very small) distances & dimensions here and there

Now Onshape is in a completely different ballpark compared to a program like the direct modeler mentioned above

If I were you, I’d take the time to go through the Onshape tutorials

And when you have a specific question as to how to do something, then post your document and clearly state where you’re having a problem, because there are many helpful people here in this forum, where you will likely get help within a fairly short period of time

Below is the type of stuff that Onshape has allowed me to do that I never could’ve done with the other programs I was using 

And what’s really cool is, I could go back into one of the features such as a variable, and tweak one number and the entire part can change. Now that is way better than direct modeling. 

MichaelPascoe

This is understandable. I have tried going back and forth between Blender and Onshape. The workflow differences between direct modeling and parametric modeling feel polar opposite.

If you are used to direct modeling software like Blender, Onshape feels impossible.
If you are used to parametric modeling like Onshape, Blender feels impossible.

nick_papageorge_dayjob

I'm also curious what you switched to. If its a mesh modeler as mentioned above, those are completely different types of design software, and not really used in the same industries. If its another parametric modeler, such as Fusion 360, Solidworks, etc., well, then that would surprise me. I've found Onshape to be the easiest to use of the parametric modelers since I started in the mid 1990's. Especially for beginners.