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First model - What's great and what I missed
andy
Member Posts: 17 ✭✭
Hi,
I finally had a chance to create my first model last night and loved using onshape. The models look great and the interface a clean and really intuitive.
There were a number of things, that either I didn't find or Im sure are in the works, that I feel are important for my workflow.
Firstly the inability to select edges/vertices of a solid, in my case a revolve and use them in a sketch is a biggie. I could work around it by selecting the original sketch and converting that to use in my new sketch, but in many cases, the new sketch may not be on the same plane as the original, so is it possible to make sketch entities coincident, tangent to etc for surfaces and solids that don't have edges, such as revolves, or can you create a sketch entity for the intersection of a solid/surface and the plane that is being sketched on?
I was modelling with only a few key dimensions in mind and this involved tangent arcs and straight lines. The behaviour of the arcs when dimensions were changed or points were dragged was a little annoying. Im not sure what the answer is here, maybe it's my fault and I could have put place holder radii on, but I feel that would have slowed my workflow down and I should have been able to get it close, and drag the points without too much trouble.
Having more control over spline handles is really important and seems to be missing. I had to create lines then change them to construction and make them tangent to the spline, when being able to add a horizontal constraint to the handle would have been far easier. There could even be a snap to horizontal. Not having handles on points along the path is a big restriction and I also didn't appear to be able to dimension the handles or show curvature, which can be really useful ... once we can start lofting surfaces. Speaking of surfaces, I wasn't able to trim a surface using the boolean tools or offset a face as a new surface. Trimmed surfaces make up a large part of my workflow.
That being said, I am quite excited about using Onshape more and seeing more and more functionality being added!
I finally had a chance to create my first model last night and loved using onshape. The models look great and the interface a clean and really intuitive.
There were a number of things, that either I didn't find or Im sure are in the works, that I feel are important for my workflow.
Firstly the inability to select edges/vertices of a solid, in my case a revolve and use them in a sketch is a biggie. I could work around it by selecting the original sketch and converting that to use in my new sketch, but in many cases, the new sketch may not be on the same plane as the original, so is it possible to make sketch entities coincident, tangent to etc for surfaces and solids that don't have edges, such as revolves, or can you create a sketch entity for the intersection of a solid/surface and the plane that is being sketched on?
I was modelling with only a few key dimensions in mind and this involved tangent arcs and straight lines. The behaviour of the arcs when dimensions were changed or points were dragged was a little annoying. Im not sure what the answer is here, maybe it's my fault and I could have put place holder radii on, but I feel that would have slowed my workflow down and I should have been able to get it close, and drag the points without too much trouble.
Having more control over spline handles is really important and seems to be missing. I had to create lines then change them to construction and make them tangent to the spline, when being able to add a horizontal constraint to the handle would have been far easier. There could even be a snap to horizontal. Not having handles on points along the path is a big restriction and I also didn't appear to be able to dimension the handles or show curvature, which can be really useful ... once we can start lofting surfaces. Speaking of surfaces, I wasn't able to trim a surface using the boolean tools or offset a face as a new surface. Trimmed surfaces make up a large part of my workflow.
Finally the export STL files dialog was not ideal. My workflow includes a lot of presentation renders using Maxwell render. Sometimes I have multiple bodies in a part and having to export each one as a single still file is not ideal. The ability to export multiple bodies in a single file, with a format such as obj or 3ds would be better. I also had to change the STL export format to text as maxwell couldn't handle the binary version and I had to use the recalculate tool to smooth the surface, which would be time consuming when dealing with more parts. My ideal of course would be to have a maxwell export plug in but I understand that it is quite a niche render solution (although there is an open source plug in for blender, which makes me wonder how hard it is). Are you guys planning on providing render platform compatibility? If so which ones?
That being said, I am quite excited about using Onshape more and seeing more and more functionality being added!
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