AI geometry feature naming

nathaniel_jeffreys

I don't know if its just me, but does anyone else find it really hard to discepline oneself into naming each geometry feature as you add it when creating a part? You get to the end of a complex design, try and go back and edit a feature, but are left wandering which of the 'chamfer 1' to 'chamfer 26' refers to the chamfer your trying to edit. In your frustration you vow to yourself that next time you will make a point of naming them as you go along - only to find yourself in the same situation a couple of projects later.

What if we could harness the power of AI to help reduce the painfull experience, speed up workflow, and make our feature lists just look a bit nicer by automatically generating suitable names for each feature…?

jelte_steur_info

The AI would have to guess your intent though, so it would be have to be almost telempathic…

throwing a bunch of features in a folder and renaming that works well as an intermediate solution or solution for part studio's with many features.

if the folder is called 'snap hooks' and there's a sketch, extrude, draft, fillet, mirror/pattern there, the functionality of the features follows from the folder name…

carol_lawrance

yeah I feel this way too, you start building something simple and suddenly you’re staring at a whole forest of “extrude 12” and “chamfer 19” wondering what past-you was thinking

honestly an AI naming helper would save so much time, especially on big parts where you just want to jump back in and tweak something without playing detective first
if it could read context and suggest a clean, meaningful name right when you create the feature, that’d make the whole workflow feel way smoother

S1mon

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/27220/ai-geometry-feature-naming

Yes, I wish there was a way to automate this, but I'm really not sure how I would expect an AI to do it, since I'm not sure how one would do it as person. Can you explain to another human your heuristics for naming? Would those rules match everyone's?

Some more practical rules that I've learned over many years:

Group features into functional chunks and put them in a folder and name the folder. When you start having more that a dozen features, you need to start doing this. When you have 100s of features, you absolutely have to at least do this. Keep your collapsed feature tree so that you do not need to scroll to see the whole thing.

The other rule of thumb is that if you find yourself stumbling around trying to find a critical feature that you need to change or tweak over and over again, take the time and give it a good name. I do not name every last fillet or chamfer. It's not worth the time. I do name folders and key features like layout sketches. I also make more and more use of variables to call out important dimensions.

You always want to be nice to future you (six months later when you need to make an update), or your coworkers if you get hit by a bus.

martin_kopplow

I am handling feature naming similarily, as @S1mon already wrote:

• Name every sketch immediately, ideally while creating.
• Use the name introduced in the sketch in names of features that build upon it.
• Name parts accordingly, so their history comes clear.
• Name planes/mate connectors and sketches based on them logically.
• Keep sets of modeling steps in adequately named folders.
• Use as few features as possible. Go back to edit the original operation whenever possible.

Since AI would have to know in advance what I'm up to while designing, I see little chance it could ever do a good job in assigning appropriate human guessable names. AI changing feature or part names after the fact could only end in a desaster. There are CAD systems out there which assign supposedly meaningful names, by grouping features under their parent entities an then make the names up on someting like a file path on your PC hard disk. That might appear logical at first, but it gets confusing very quickly, as names get longer and have repeating similar elements: It is the fillet of the edge of the extrusion of the sketch with the circle on the face of loft of the edge of the face with the hole and the projection of the curve of the …. ;0)

So, I believe the best way is to name everything immediately and use the correct technical term for it, especially to not explode Onshape's collaboration capabiliies by assigning misleading or ambiguous names.

Derek_Van_Allen_BD

Same general strategy here but my modeling process has shifted towards mega features that do more powerful stuff with fewer items cluttering the feature tree. Why have 500 fillet features when you can set up 3 query variables that grab all of your convex vertical edges that get one size, all the concave edges that get a different size, and all the top faces that get a third size? Usually when you're designing for manufacturing you're following a schedule of rules exactly like that with your parts and it's recently become mind numbingly easy to implement those rules explicitly in your document with the advent of QVs and QV+. Now the prospect of naming features is much less daunting when you can replace 500 features in a tree with 50.