'Changes' History - possible enhancements re View Controls

andrew_troup

One thing which I am noticing about the Part Studio as a one-stop modelling shop: it can be rather laborious switching the necessary view controls on and off.

Take the example of hiding fifty-some parts and unhiding forty-eleven sketches, then turning off visibility of all but one sketch, then turning all the sketches back on...

Another question is alterations to the viewpoint. One handy feature of Solidworks is the ability to cycle back through previous view alterations.

I'm wondering if there's a way of enriching existing tools, rather than adding new ones, to address at least some of these limitations.

For instance (and here I'm really just thinking out loud) perhaps there could be two versions of the Workspace 'Changes' history, one dealing with substantive changes (ie changes to the substance of the model) and one dealing with visibility or presentation changes (such as show/hide, view angles, transparency; but perhaps even colours, explode states, and other future enhancements...)

And perhaps, at least in the latter case, some ability to select and name certain lines in that history, so they could quickly be accessed and summoned up from a compact, scrollable list, effectively delivering at least the crucial elements of both "named views" and "display states", in Solidworks-speak.
(The latter in particular had some clunky aspects, particularly in the confusing way it interacted with the deeply entrenched, relatively ancient UX of configurations, which seemed to have been implemented with zero foreknowledge that display states would be a future requirement)

One of the great breakthroughs in navigating large assemblies in Solidworks was the introduction of "Isolate", which Solidworks implemented as a temporary override (which I personally think was genius).  It does not alter the 'hide/show' state of any of the parts; it just ignores them for as long as the command remains active. 

"Hide other parts", the Onshape equivalent, is superficially the same, but it changes the underlying hide/show status of all those parts, rather than temporarily overriding them.

What this means is that the user cannot revert to the status quo, which automatically happens with Isolate when it is deselected.

Say I am showing a scattered handful of parts in a large collection, and I need to add a feature to one of them.
In Solidworks, I can "Isolate" that part so I can get a clear shot at all its surfaces and edges, and then when I've added the feature, deactivate the "Isolate" mode, so I'm back to seeing the same handful of parts I'm interested in. 

In Onshape, I don't know a way of duplicating this. If I use "Restore" from the Workspace (Changes) History, I will also lose the substantive changes, namely the feature I added.


This is just one of a large number of loosely related issues. It seems to me this whole question needs a fresh approach, learning from the inelegancies and roadblocks of current best practice in other packages, so I thought I'd launch a round-table discussion here. Any thoughts?

brucebartlett

I proposed having a display state/group display/named display/named isolated group/what ever you call it. A quick way to display of a named group of parts. Is this what your thinking @andrew_troup ?

andrew_troup

I was thinking of something like:  two parallel versions of the Workspace 'Changes' history, one dealing with modelling changes, and one dealing with visibility or presentation changes.

And, in the latter case, the ability to select and name certain lines in that history, so they could quickly be accessed and summoned up from a compact, scrollable list (and also edited at a later date)

So it's a bit more than a named group of parts: it's a named subset of parts, with certain display characteristics, viewed from a certain direction.

I'm hoping that it could replace a bunch of different tools, (perhaps even including "exploded view") in a more seamless and straightforward way. But it's not a carefully thought out proposition, more of a conversation starter.

3dcad

I surely would like to see 'view history' as a horizontal time-line which you can drag and set named points into that.
I think prev-next buttons for view is not very usable (alibre has this, don't find myself using very often)..