my first impressions, working with big parts and assemblys

MightyM

Hi Everyone,

I'm new to Onshape. I just want to share some thoughts and my first impressions about the product.

I work as an engineer. I design injection molding tools on Catia V5. most of my work is for the automotive industry. I'm here because i'm also interested in other projects and whats the Future of CAx.

please excuse my bad english. my mother tongue is German.

first thing i've noticed is that onshape has some great features that even in big High-End-CADs are missing. The first steps are realy easy to learn. It seams that it doesn't matter if you want to model a single part, multiple bodys, or a assembly. the collaboration features, version control, merging branches and many other features are rally great.

but what i'm curious about is, how do you manage working on big parts and assemblies with hundreds of parts and thousands of features and sketches. In Catia V5 a clean Workflow is very important and essential. many Companies have strict guidelines how a model has to be build and how it should look like. so thats one thing that makes it hard for me to really get familiar with onshape.

3dcad

Onshape has some powerfull workflows to reduce the amount of features and sketches but the difficult part is that many parts share same things in feature tree. In my opinion UI is not ready for "hundreds of parts and thousands of features and sketches".

daniel_chow

Subscribed to this thread. 

I'm very interested in the future of onShape. 

Question: Why do you feel onShape is not ready for "hundreds of parts and thousands of features"? How well do other CAD applications handle things like collaboration and sharing? I'm only a secondary school teacher, but I am finding the collaboration and sharing essential. I get my students to share their models with me, I make edits and comments. Some of them are actually at par with me in their onShape / CAD skills. But I have more experience in producing their models on our 3D printers. 

I have some limited experience in AutoCAD. 

MightyM

daniel_chow said:

Question: Why do you feel onShape is not ready for "hundreds of parts and thousands of features"? 

I don't know if onshape is ready for big parts and assemblies. i'm just a newbie in Onshape. but my 14 years experience with Catia V4 and Catia V5 tells me that something is missing. The bigger a part or assembly gets, the harder it is to keep the overview. But maybe I only don't understand the idea behind Onshape.

I think it would be great if you can arrange reference geometrie like Sketches, Planes and Surfaces into geometrical sets. something like it's already there for surfaces, but with the option to create individual geometrical sets.

another thing is, the most time you don't want to see the whole feature list. the most time you want to see only the features of the part or body you are currently working on.

philip_thomas

@MightyM - thank you for using Onshape and thank you for your input.
We need the perspective of users like you who are today using a very mature tool (CATIA).

We are still at the very earliest stages of developing Onshape. We are building out a global infrastructure, an industry first collaboration capability, built-in data management and some innovative workflows. Today we are already in production use with a large number of companies and every three weeks we release new capabilities that extend the utility of those already using Onshape, as well as make Onshape viable to larger and larger groups of professional users.

We have learnt from previous lives that as more and more people use Onshape, that the 'size' of the assemblies created will continue to grow. We will of course be providing the tools necessary to manage these assemblies and even today, we regularly test part studios with many hundreds of features.

Keep the suggestions coming and we will respond to user needs. Hopefully this post explains where we are now and just how committed we are to developing full cloud professional grade 3D CAD. 

3dcad

@philip_thomas
I think you are on right track waiting for user input to get better grip on what needs to be done rather than forcing in something that might not serve your customers.
And for the feature tree case, I'm not yet sure what would be my dreamTree in multipart environment so I will keep working and will tell you when I see the light  
I like and use RMB menu on modeling area a lot since it gives direct access to sketch / feature what made that specific part.

daniel_chow

Hello everyone, 

I'm a bit biased on what I'm about to say because ... well, I am an educator! 

But I feel the educational market should not be underestimated. It is the colleges and universities that should also be the focus for this startup in addition to the professional market. I'm sure the onShape team has thought about this but in brief, here's why:

Students growing up using tools like onShape are likely to carry this tool with them as they intern for companies and organizations. They'll remember tools like Office 365, Google Apps, onShape as they start up their own companies. Or as they move to more prominent positions within an existing organization. As the workforce changes and us 40+ work force members retire and the younger generation replaces us, so too will the legacy tools as software offerings like onShape takes their place. These are students who grew up with the ability to collaborate online, with ONE copy of the work that exists online. They understand the difference between publicly sharing a model and private sharing. These are students who understand the downfall of emailing a copy of that sketch document to 5 different people thereby creating 5 possible versions and 5 separate workflows. These are students who know there is a more effective way of doing things other than searching their email for the latest version of a file that is being passed around, then having to check of anyone else made an edit to it and then having to synchronize edits. 

Secondly, college and university instructors may be a good market as well. Hopefully, instructors and profs are more willing than established industry to try and implement new, cutting edge tools looking to give their students the edge over another institution. As we all know, the reputation and name brand of a college is very important to their livelihood. Not just keeping that reputation or name brand but building it. Post secondary institutions are in fierce competition with each other to attract the brightest students and the best instructors / professors. The more successful their students, the better it is for their program and school name. Think for a moment, why do post secondary organizations go to such efforts to hand out scholarships? 

That said, I feel that onShape has already done a great job of bringing in the edu market with their free, full functional accounts. But it doesn't hurt to push it along even further. For example, show up at their product / vendor fairs, be a guest speaker to a lecture, do demos, try to find a champion within the edu institution and give that person a complementary subscription, host a competition of some sort then offering a prize trophy or banner with the OS logo on it. Teachers, instructors, profs and PARENTS love winning stuff! Its something a school, teacher, parent can be proud of ... and something a student can use in their professional profile. 

lana

@MightyM

Notice the search filters you can use on Part Studio feature tree. https://cad.onshape.com/help/#sketch.htm?Highlight=search filter

daniel_chow

Another thing to keep in mind is if you read about the capital this onShape venture is attracting in addition to the caliber of its people, who would invest that kind of money into this venture unless they first prove that their idea of cloud-based CAD can stand up to many parts in one sketch of assembly? To attract that kind of capital / investment, the beta developers would need to demonstrate without a doubt that their technology will work. That means they would have to put together a pre-beta / prototype system and be able to explain to investors in a non-technical way. I say non-technical because I'm guessing most investors will not understand the highly technical details. They just need to be convinced its going to work before they open their wallets. 

This would all have to be part of the initial business plan in order to not only attract this kind of investment, but also the caliber of people who have already joined the OS tream. 

I don't know if OS is robust enough to handle complex designs because my skills are not there yet. But I believe it is based on the above reasoning. 

MightyM

@lana

Thanks for the hint. this really is a very helpful feature.
I wish i have something like this on my Catia