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Improvements to Onshape - November 22nd, 2024
NeilCooke
Moderator, Onshape Employees Posts: 5,695 
PART STUDIOS
FLATTEN SURFACES
Flatten surfaces is a new Analysis tool that generates a planar surface from one or more contiguous non-planar surfaces. This is useful to evaluate the flat (cut) shape for a paint mask, decal, or text curves. The result can be exported to PARASOLID, STL, DXF, or SVG file format.PAUSE REGENERATION
Part Studio regeneration can be temporarily paused while multiple configuration, variable table values, or feature parameters are modified.SKETCH PROFILE INSPECTOR
Tiny gaps between sketch entities are difficult to detect, especially in complex imported DXF files. The Profile inspector, a new sketch diagnostics tool, quickly finds all the open ends of non-construction geometry.SKETCH BEZIER CURVE
Elevating the degree of a Bezier sketch entity increases the number of control points while maintaining the exact geometry. Lowering the degree reduces the number of control points, preserving the geometry where possible and approximating the geometry as closely as possible when exact geometry cannot be maintained.
THICKNESS ANALYSIS
Thickness analysis is now available for Onshape Professional and Onshape Education Enterprise users.
DRAWINGS
PASTE AS TABLE WITH FORMATTING
Tables created by pasting cells from Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel now import text styles (font size, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough) and cell width and height. Note that if a style is applied to only part of the cell text, it is not preserved.
RELEASE MANAGEMENT
ADDING OBJECTS FROM OTHER DOCUMENTS
Onshape Professional users can now add parts, assemblies, drawings or files from other documents to a single release candidate and release them together.RENDER STUDIO
LEGACY RENDER STUDIO BETA TABS ⚠️
Render Studio was officially released in Onshape 1.181 (May 17th, 2024). Access to the beta version of Render Studio will cease on February 29th, 2025 and all exisiting Render Studio beta tabs created prior to the official release will be automatically deleted on this date. Only rendered output created from those tabs will remain.SELECT MATCHING INSTANCES
All instances of the same part or subassembly can now be selected by right-clicking and choosing Select matching instances, regardless of where they appear in the assembly structure.
ISOLATE TRANSFORMS AND PROJECTORS
All entities added to a Transform or Projector can now be isolated on screen with a simple right-click.
MOBILE
MERGE LINES ON iOS
Merge lines can now be displayed on an iOS device for a clear high-level overview of the development timeline.
LEARNING CENTER
CERTIFICATION
The Onshape Learning Center has upgraded the certification experience. Both exams are now fully embedded in the Learning Center and do not require navigation to a separate testing platform. The Certified Onshape Associate has also been upgraded with completely new data sets to test your CAD knowledge.
API QUICKSTART
Building off of our previously released Introduction to the Onshape API course, we have now added an Onshape REST API Quickstart video explaining how to create a simple application for personal use.
Please take a moment to try out these new features and improvements and leave your comments below. For a detailed list of all the changes in this update, please see the changelog.
Senior Director, Technical Services, EMEAI
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Comments
Christmas comes every three weeks with Onshape.
Pause regen! no longer do I need to include that option in slow/complex features. What a life saver.
Flatten is great, but its a bit annoying that it only exports. Post-flattening workflow is going to require a reimport of the file.
But still, super excited to see flatten get used. Opens up a lot of options that were going to be incredibly difficult with featurescript.
Custom FeatureScript and Onshape Integrated Applications
Definitely some good stuff in here!
I'm a little bit puzzled by the flatten not being able to produce a surface in the part studio though… That seems like it would be useful… You can export but it creates a download, why not at least offer a "save as new tab". Even better why not just be a feature that generates the face so that it can update parametrically?
Flatten is huge. I've needed that a number of times, but I agree with @Caden_Armstrong - I very much wish that it was able to generate geometry without a round-trip through an export/import. I have to assume that will come later?
Sketch profile inspector should really help a ton of people clean up DXFs. This is a great quality of life thing, and it (obviously to Onshape) comes up on the forums all the time.
Béziers raising/lowering cleanly is a very nice fix. Thank you! I'm glad my cranky response to the 1.188 release was addressed.
Pausing regen is great. It would be cool if it was more flexible about previewing the selection, the way @EvanReese 's Selection Fillet works with its pause regen built in. I suspect that would take some new Featurescript functionality to separate out a preview from a full blown regen.
great new additions, especially the sketch improvements!
Ok. Flatten is one of the best new things that was just added for free to Onshape!
Here's a flattened version of a part where I had simulated fabric wrapping some molded foam for a headband of a product. It does take a while to process this, but it's so much better than having to use another package.
The "origin" and mate connector selections are a little weird. They're not used in the demo, but in order to have the flat pattern appear where I would like, it sometimes helps to have the surface split at the "origin". Then add a mate connector at that same location, but with the Z pointing into the part.
Also not shown in the demo above, is the facet view, which is also helpful. You can see how the surfaces have been tessellated to simulate the stretching/flattening.
I'm looking forward to more development and in depth demos. Actually I just looked, and here's @GregBrown with a more full demo:
The flatten surfaces and the sketch profile inspector will be exciting to try out. Great updates.
So many goodies! Pause regeneration is particularly exciting! Flatten has also come up for me a decent amount and this will be super helpful so I don't have to leave Onshape to get it.
Kudos OS. Some vary nice updates today, especially flatten. I like the spread sheet connectivity as well and hope it propagates into other areas as well.☺️
the flatten surface feature that has been long awaited, it would be better to have an option to export to tab and the result of this flattening to become a part or surface so it can be modified again.
Suspending on regeneration is great as well as flattening. Having the flatten feature with in-part studio surface result would be pretty useful though, especially if it would be possible to create inverse transformation of the objects associated with flattened surface to the curved one.
Flatten surface and from a mesh too…..wow thank you that is unexpected but very welcome
Yes! Flatten surface! This affects my workflow nearly every day, so this is huge. I agree with the others regarding building the flattened geometry right into Onshape to keep with the core data model, but this is a huge step. I also hope to see this paired up with more robust sheet metal forming functionality which would round out a full end-to-end workflow.
The other improvements are awesome as well! It's so good to have these updates every few weeks as I think it really helps to get new stuff into workflows right away rather than monster releases once per year that are difficult to fully digest.
Big plus with sketch profile inspector.
With the launch of flatten surfaces does this mean we are getting closer to the release of sheet metal loft??? crossing fingers……..
Twitter: @BryanLAGdesign
My thoughts exactly. It seems like this functionality could converge on something like a mix of sheet metal flat view and UV unwrapping for texture mapping. I could certainly see a "Flatten" feature that behaves like the sheet metal feature, and would open up a lot of modeling power. This could also make complex decals possible across multiple surfaces of any kind. I get that this is likely an order of magnitude more work to do though, and I'm very grateful to get the flattening we see today.
Flatten surfaces, one small step. Next step flatten cone's etc.
Export to SVG
Next step import SVG???
In 4 week's it is christmas ???
The flatten looks great. I am looking forward to using it.
Twitter: @onshapetricks & @babart1977
Love the new flatten feature, I would love to see edges show up in .DXF for fold lines and stuff.
GOLD! hell yeah flatten is sick even though I don't use it at work and pause regen is going to save me from moving the regen bar over and over and over again! THANK YOU!
Love the Google tables coming in proper and sketch inspector will come in might handy when I import PDF's converted to DXF's
beautiful features. also very happy with the sketch profile inspector!
Awesome release. Flatten surfaces is major. Thank you!
UV texture mapping is where my mind went right away as well…
Wow wow wow!
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with you on this!! hopefully a nice big final Chrismas release for sheet metal!
Flatten surfaces and pause regen are huge!
展平功能太棒了!
I also like the sketch inspector a lot. A good CAD needs handy tools like this.
I've been waiting for these features!! The sketch inspector it's such a time saver. And the flatten surface… well, it's like Christmas already!!
Fixing the decreasing degree of Bezier is great. Previously we could end up with straight line after several iterations as shown in my comment.
I really like pasting table with initial, simple formatting. Looking forward for additional improvements. 🙂
Profile inspector went a great way from the early stages, it's really cool now and will quickly help find holes and repair sketches.
Is there a clearance check tool in Onshape? Vote for clearance check tool to be added! 😀
Very nice update! I'd love to see a "pause" mode in render studio aswell so that one can assign materials, adjust the perspective, etc. without Onshape rendering all the time. With larger assemblies that is quite time consuming.