Improvements to Onshape - November 22nd, 2024

SebastianMaklary

Flatten surface is an important capability and I am happy to see it implemented, though as others, I would prefer if it could be a feature that would create a surface body.

For now though, It means that another reason for keep visiting our Solidworks license is no longer valid.

sebastian_glanzner

Great updates, thank you Onshape team!

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/110024#Comment_110024

You actually can flatten cones! But I would really like it to be implemented in the sheet metal tools.

Hfrossard

Easily one of the best upgrades I have come across.

GregBrown

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/110035#Comment_110035

Thanks for all the feedback on this new feature. If you have improvement requests like the one you mention here, we'd love to get them in the system the normal way…

joshtargo

@sebastian_glanzner my Extract Flat FS does sheet metal.

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/ee5fe3705045d8cf9e3fe478/w/6c8344d774ce4c4c0e00ad7e/e/2e3c34069cc7000fbe02adb9

Lucas_Kuhns

Very nice update. I like the sketch profile inspector and pause regen!

eric_pesty

I created an IR for flatten surface to be a feature… Go vote for it!
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/25980/make-flatten-surface-into-a-feature-that-creates-a-surface-in-the-part-studio#latest

AEC

Christmas is early this year, thickness analysis tool 🤤 amazing!

JosefBurjeta

Checking the changelog, there shall be an update regarding pasting tables from Google Sheets or MS Excel. There's definitely some improvement done, but a lot is still missing.

Changelog: Support styling (bold, italic, cell colors ..) and cell width/height on paste from Excel/GSheets in Drawings

• Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough works
• Other types of styles unfortunately did not improve
• Cell height/width is somewhat changing, but is definitely not the same as from input
• Font size is not computed correctly from "pt" to "mm" (I believe that's why the cell sizing is wrong as well)

Thanks for looking into this 🙂

john_mcclary

Very nice update!

Some of my favorites this round, the very special ones are bold or italic :)

1. New flatten surface export
2. New Sketch profile inspector tool
3. New Paused regeneration mode for Part Studios!!
4. Support for Thickness Analysis for Professional and Enterprise Edu users
5. Support including decals in thumbnails
6. Support styling (bold, italic, cell colors ..) and cell width/height on paste from Excel/GSheets in Drawings
7. Render Studio: Select all instances of Part or sub Assembly

I think the Onshape crew was hoping their name gets brought up this year at the Thanksgiving table when everyone says what they are thankful for 😉

Can't wait to see what they do for Christmas, unless they take a well-deserved break for December's release.

ilya_baran

A number of users have asked why flatten surface cannot be used in downstream features without reimporting and when that will be fixed.

We are planning to make it easier to use the flat by allowing export-to-tab, as well as further "comfort" enhancements.

What we are not currently planning to do is to allow flattening to be an automatically regenerating parametric feature that produces the flat surface: the algorithm is quite complex and numerically sensitive and the requirement to keep old versions regenerating perfectly will hamper our ability to make improvements in the future.

christian_petty

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/109992#Comment_109992

Agreed—this could be useful for molds or jigs.

pmc_pmc

Flatten, pause regen, sketch inspector for small gaps, and useful bezier degree reduction are all relevant for a current project.

Not the first but maybe the most dramatic instance of JIT functionality in Onshape. :)

adam_geary

Oh I'll definitely be using that flatten surfaces tool in the future. I've always wanted that! And I have to deal with complex dxfs all the time, so the sketch inspector will be great.

ilya_baran

One more thing on surface flatten: I'd like to acknowledge and thank Michael Rabinovich, Roi Poranne, Daniele Panozzo, and Olga Sorkine-Hornung for their excellent paper "Scalable Locally Injective Mappings," which served as the basis for our surface flattening algorithm.

S1mon

@ilya_baran Thanks for sharing that. It's fascinating to see the background for new functionality like this.

1. Was this implemented in FeatureScript or something else?
2. Will it be possible to tweak any of the parameters in the future?
3. Has it been benchmarked against any of the other tools out there for accuracy in real materials?

ilya_baran

@S1mon

1. This is implemented in C++. FeatureScript isn't great for heavy computation. @Michael_Lauer, an Onshape founder, is the lead developer on this, BTW.
2. Maybe? What parameters would you like to tweak?
3. The method is not physics-based, so it's not simulating a real material. The primary goal is a robust approximate solution in reasonable time. We've done internal comparison against other CAD systems on performance and distortion and our method does well. But for physical accuracy and specific material properties, you have to go to a specialized simulation/analysis package.

andrew_kleinert

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/109990#Comment_109990

A guess about why OS have done it this way …

… It provides OS with the flexibility to change functionality of this later. They can change assumptions, change default behaviour, change functionality, or even add functionality without having to worry about backward compatibility.

If they had allowed it to be integrated into the parametric tree, and then made changes to functionality later, users would rightfully get very upset if a parametric model that was perfectly fine yesterday / last week / last month / last year is today either materially different or even broken for no apparent reason other than a software update. OS could create model migration filters to handle changes (as they have done in the past), but that adds more development, testing, processing (and risk) that is probably better spent elsewhere.

There is the possibility that the export - import functionality that has been implemented here could result in a different outcome between versions, but as this is a manual process under user control, there is far less risk of this leading to user angst. Us users expect to have to fix something up whenever we re-import it.

Edit: What Ilya said.