Improvements to Onshape - November 30, 2015

lougallo

Update day is here!  We are excited to show you a number of improvements in this week's push including Split, Sketching and Drawings.  Here are the goods:

1. NEW Intersection sketches - convert the intersection of faces with a sketch plane into a sketch
   
   https://youtu.be/Wem4X6VldW0
   
   
2. NEW Split face - project and split faces with sketch entities
   
   https://youtu.be/G1v5fCQXVPE
   
   
3. Sketch picture improvements - Edit and replace (after delete) of sketch picture and drag position clicking on image (not just the frame)
   
   
   
   
4. NEW Detail views - Drawings now has detail views
   
   https://youtu.be/2G5-uSLZU4k
   
   
5. NEW  Line-to-line centerlines - Drawings can now add centerlines between entities
   
   https://youtu.be/Zqn4DlECMBE
   
   

Honorable mentions:

• Better mate connector naming (includes associated part name)
  
  
  
  
• Drawing view projection preview performance improvements 
• Drawing note text size remembers last setting 
  
• Invite a friend now allows for a personal message.
  
  
  

We hope you get a chance to check these new features out and send us your thoughts.

Remember: The updates listed here are now live for all users when creating new documents and over the next few days these features will also be available in documents created before the date of this update.

pete_yodis

Awesome stuff @lougallo I love the addition of surface split with sketches.  You're ticking things off on my list: https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/337/functionality-needed-for-metal-casting-and-plastic-part-design

Detail view is a big one too.

andrew_troup

Split face is a biggie, for me, with intersection curves a close second.

I really like the way Split face is incorporated into the existing "Split" command. It's great to see relatively few icons leading seamlessly to so much capability (for instance "Extrude" and "Revolve", each of which does the job of four separate commands in Solidworks, plus integrated Boolean.

ON EDIT: I tried copying tabs from an existing model into a brand new model to have some tricky examples to work with, but it seems the new functionality is only available in Part Studios created from scratch. I'll try deriving the bodies across.

brucebartlett

Great Improvements, Split Surface with is one I have also been keenly chasing. Intersection sketches will also be very handy.

lougallo

@andrew_troup We will get your existing docs upgraded over the next day or so. 

andrew_troup

@lougallo
Yes, I fully understood that, both from your OP, and from experience.

What I was trying to save others the trouble of discovering for themselves is that they cannot jump the gun by copying existing Part Studios to a brand new document.

It was not obvious.to me (and I thought it might not be to others) that some tabs within a single new document might have commands available that others do not, even if only for a few days.

pete_yodis

@andrew_troupYou might raise a good point about things not being obvious.  I wonder if an indication on the document not being up to current standings would be helpful, or necessary?

shashank_aarya

Great updates! Intersection sketch is awesome! Also it was very nice to see the provision of identifying the associated parts of mate connectors.

viru

Nice sets of improvements, Split Surface with sketches and Intersection sketches will be very helpful for us.

virendrasingh

Great update! I like "NEW Intersection sketches" very much ! before this improvement, I have to split a part by a plane ,then get the section profile by "Use"in the sketch, and  merge the two split parts by "boolean", now it is getting much more easy by using "intersection"tool 

fastwayjim

Excellent stuff! 

andrew_troup

Regarding detail views: the release notes suggest it's only implemented at this stage for circles.

If so, are there any plans to permit closed splines and ellipses in future?

Reason 1: Detail views can be a very useful way to convey information pertaining to a particular set of features, which might be arranged in a long skinny group, or (say) an L or T shape.
It may be desirable for clarity to corral them, if they are surrounded by other, unrelated, potentially distracting or confusing features.

Reason 2: Drawings with lots of detail views are much easier to interpret if all the detail views fit on the same sheet as the parent view.
This need to shoehorn them in requires compact boundaries.
A long skinny hole pattern (say) is much more efficiently depicted within an ellipse than a circle. 

3dcad

And special thanks for adding:
 

jon_mcintyre

@andrew_troup
Thank you for your suggestions regarding detail views.  As you probably know this is just the beginning for detail views.  Given the variety of appearances which standards allow and which can be found in use, we'll have to be adding many more options for detail views in the future.  I'll make sure your feedback is considered during the planning. 

andrew_troup

@3dcad
Well spotted. It seems to me puzzling that we still don't get a full list of changes, and have to stumble over stuff by accident. I'd have thought Onshape would be keen for us ALL to know about their good works, rather than the selected highlights we seem to get.

(Feedback ticket implementation is notified only to the initiator, and even in the more public case of Improvement Requests : "Following" an IR seems to achieve precisely nothing: I have not received notifications about the fulfillment of IRs intiated by others, despite following them, in fact I have not noticed ANY notifications relating to IRs being followed, or any different behaviour versus those which are not)

Once we're accustomed to a certain workflow it's easy to overlook non-notified improvements, and can be disappointing to find months later, that we've been needlessly working around a limitation or lack which has been addressed.

3dcad

@andrew_troup Yes it would be very good to know what has changed in each update - somehow current update broke sketch pattern to not accept 1 as count to default direction (reported and identified as bug).. If we knew what has been changed we could test for anomalies around those functions rather than bumping into them in hurry.

Hakro

I am not able to create detail views in section views and isometric views.
Is it a bug or a feature?