Improvements to Onshape - August 1st, 2018

Don_Van_Zile

michael3424 said:

What surprises me is how smoothly the updates integrate with the rest of the package.  They must have some really smart people doing the planning and implementation of new features.

A lot of those "really smart people" among others of course came from building Solidworks back in 1995 (and later years)

What's interesting is back in 1995, SW UI and workflows echoed the Windows UI that most everyone was already accustomed to then as Windows was becoming mainstream upon release.

Now fast forward 20+ years of experience building today's most popular design tool and DS shoving an ecosystem and experience that nobody knows what it is or even wants. 

Just a few short years into Onshape development another similar theme that made SW successful back in 95 is happening again now, but with Onshape. "Everyone" knows how to use an internet browser - EVERYONE. The "Browser" represents the new "Windows" paradigm today in that people are familiar with the "Tabbed" workflows and added the mostly transparent "Cloud" of Amazon servers behind the scenes. Take that a new generation of young people who are familiar with "Google Docs" workflows and ice the cake with collaborative design - wow. An engineering manager with any forward thinking should be able to start to see how to leverage this and scale people where needed.

For example, right now a project is almost done by an individual, but the drawings need to be completed and released to manufacturing; prints are needed yesterday. Another person(s) can start detailing the parts and this is where it gets interesting. You could have potentially X number of people to start producing drawings from anywhere on the globe and scale as needed depending on how big the job is. You have 100 components you need drawings for? You could have 2,5,10 or 100 people creating drawings of different parts at the same time to shorten that time-to-completion linearly or even exponentially. I see this collaborative drawings effort in larger companies really showcase Onshape aside from collaborative design as Onshape becomes more widespread as it obviously matures.

It's a beautiful thing to watch evolve and be a part of again 20+ years later! 

As far as the smooth transitions go, I believe this is revolutionary that Onshape users just take for granted. Gaming systems have to wait to download and install updates even today; they're not even caught up yet this generation.

This SW thread in my opinon aside from many other aspects of course is why Onshape will become king.
https://forum.solidworks.com/thread/223031

jackson_king

Just read the thread @Don_Van_Zile linked to.  Oh my!  How quickly I have forgotten the old headaches......

Now it's just:
(1) did my computer turn on? YES!
(2) does chrome still work like it did the day before? YES!
(3) is Onshape ready to go?  YES, you know it is!

jackson_king

I forgot before to mention that it is so nice that the people who make Onshape, Onshape, listen to our feedback and implement suggestions as they see fit.  That allows me to feel connected with the program as it feels as if it was designed for me;)

owen_sparks

jackson_king said:

Just read the thread @Don_Van_Zile linked to.  Oh my!  How quickly I have forgotten the old headaches......

Now it's just:
(1) did my computer turn on? YES!

Or better still "Does any computer I wander up to anywhere in my company, or at home, or anywhere on the planet turn on and run chrome". 

As for the drawings I really hope there isn't a huge effort going into coding them just for drawing to be made obsolete, hopefully in the next couple of years.  Modeling something in 3D, to convert it to 2D so the company making the actual 3D parts can turn them back into 3D is going to look soooooooo silly sooner rather than later.

Owen S.

john_mcclary

owen_sparks said:

As for the drawings I really hope there isn't a huge effort going into coding them just for drawing to be made obsolete, hopefully in the next couple of years.  Modeling something in 3D, to convert it to 2D so the company making the actual 3D parts can turn them back into 3D is going to look soooooooo silly sooner rather than later.

Owen S.

Owen. Drawings will not be obsolete in my field. There is information on a drawing that explains what processes are to be used, and how precise they need to be. This information could be in the model in some meta data. But that would required training all of the vendors of the world to use every cad package available in order to know where and how to look for that meta data that their customer happens to be using.

A drawing is simple and vividly clear about everything someone needs to know about a specific part with very little training.

I cannot see drawings going away any time soon. At least until all the old soft headed people who have a hard time keeping up with future tech die off from an asteroid strike... We will need drawings as they are still in charge, and will not even attempt learning new skills.

Most (all but 2) of my customers only have 2D cad, and require at least a plan view of everything. And it is painful to not have blocks available through export, because all lines are just dumb lines, and when you have an engine block with 1,000 radius and contours sitting in your machine and you need to select every line and change it to "Red" "Phantom 2". It means there is still work that needs to be done in Onshape's drawings to be ready to slow down progress in that area.

So until then, I (and many others) require drawings to have as much dedication to the code as the 3D side.

AuroraRon

How on earth can we not export in IOS a PDF drawing yet?  All this work to export files but not a drawing. It's amazing it took this long and even more so that we still have to do a screen capture to save a drawing and use another app to sketch some note on it.  

AuroraRon

Simple parts, speed may have improved. Complex parts its never been so bad.  I work with engines and have to keep stripping parts off assemblies to get anything to load.  Tried different operating systems, browsers, and internet connections, nothing works.  Today I waited 10 minutes and just gave up. 

john_mcclary

only 10 minutes? It took us 2 hours to export a PDF in solidworks today 

Have you tried reducing the tessellation quality on parts that don't require it?
Can you simplify some parts in your assembly?
Have you used the feedback tool to ask for help from the support team?

AuroraRon

10 Minutes for the PDF that was already created to reload so I can see it and print it.  If I want to add a dimension I have to move the mouse over the point and wait.  Click on anything and wait some more. Its a resource issue, they have played with it before.   If I can't load what used to load before and the browsers keep telling showing message that there is no response from the server, I have no chance to change anything.    I have had enough support tickets on these issues, its not new to them.    Yes its better than solidworks in many respects and for that I support Onshape but when issues like this keep showing up, one can only put up with it for so long. 

MBartlett21

@AuroraRon
How good is your internet? 

AuroraRon

Internet is fine.  I use it at a business, home and on cellular LTE. Tried other locations also.   It seems to be resources and they can turn it up or down.  They have done it before.  Now I see someone working on it and its way up there in speed. You can also in google chrome watch network activity and see what hangs for example. Its not on this end.    One thing that was suggested is to make versions of assemblies, it will load faster and that seems to be true.   Just cant do this when importing an assembly and its an engine for example.     

Would be helpful to have some information like this.    Will try and split up work into different documents.  I have a lot of tabs but, how can you get around that? 

jackson_king

@AuroraRon

You can create a version of the document and then tell your top level sub-assemblies to be set to that version.  I can attest to the increase in performance.  Last fall I was working on a large project, top level assembly was about 65 feet long, it had very long load times and by versioning the top level assembly it drastically reduced load times and click performance.

If you are importing engine models, it may be worth the time to create those subassemblies.  You can also version individual parts in those assemblies.  It seems to help with Onshape loading times when you give a version for it to point to 

AuroraRon

Sounds like some great information thank you.  Trouble is, I can't even load it do try this.  

Loading Studio Data

It just keeps on spinning for ten minutes with virtually no network activity.   

Cache_River_Mill

Thank you!

AuroraRon

Support ticket answered.  Sorry for the performance hit and the same suggestion about versioning.  Looks like a normal thing for complex drawings.  As a person who knew absolutely zero about CAD two years ago, I somehow advanced to the level of being too complex in my drawings for Onshape.  Well I guess I should be saying thank you?   Perhaps it is time to address performance issues, limitations and how to work with what the limitation are rather than turn happy customers into angry ones.   

john_mcclary

With great complexity comes great responsibility

nick_lumb

My favourite improvement this time is moving multiple features at once :-) 

This means I am even more excited about a future that includes folders in the feature tree!  Given that we really need keyboard control of the rollback bar, what keys would work for <up>, <down>, <top of tree>, <end of tree>, <over closed folder>, <into closed folder>?  Or do we forget the last two and use the mouse to open and close folders as needed?

owen_sparks

nick_lumb said:

My favourite improvement this time is moving multiple features at once :-) 

This means I am even more excited about a future that includes folders in the feature tree!  Given that we really need keyboard control of the rollback bar, what keys would work for <up>, <down>, <top of tree>, <end of tree>, <over closed folder>, <into closed folder>?  Or do we forget the last two and use the mouse to open and close folders as needed?

Cursor keys for up down one line and "Alt" cursor for top / end and shift cursor to "shift" into folder?

OwS.

MBartlett21

owen_sparks said:

nick_lumb said:

My favourite improvement this time is moving multiple features at once :-) 

This means I am even more excited about a future that includes folders in the feature tree!  Given that we really need keyboard control of the rollback bar, what keys would work for <up>, <down>, <top of tree>, <end of tree>, <over closed folder>, <into closed folder>?  Or do we forget the last two and use the mouse to open and close folders as needed?

Cursor keys for up down one line and "Alt" cursor for top / end and shift cursor to "shift" into folder?

OwS.

Maybe use the Home and End buttons to go to the top and bottom.

I'd also rather use Page Up/Down for navigating the feature tree

brucebartlett

nick_lumb said:

This means I am even more excited about a future that includes folders in the feature tree!  

I can't say I am over excited about folders in the feature tree. I definitely want them in the assembly tree and for mates.  But I can only see folders in the feature tree adding more complexity as you try to order features, the folder would almost have to be feature dependent, so as drag it in the tree in the internal features are all reordered as if no folder were present, therefore you could not just randomly place any feature in a folder but only features in a
sequence.  

jackson_king

I have wished for folders in assemblies for quite some time now.  Another thing on the old wish list is to have some way of knowing if the feature tree contains errors. Maybe a red feature list count or something. 

Don_Van_Zile

jackson_king said:

I have wished for folders in assemblies for quite some time now.  Another thing on the old wish list is to have some way of knowing if the feature tree contains errors. Maybe a red feature list count or something. 

I couldn't agree more on both comments!

brucebartlett

jackson_king said:

I have wished for folders in assemblies for quite some time now.  Another thing on the old wish list is to have some way of knowing if the feature tree contains errors. Maybe a red feature list count or something. 

I absolutely agree folders in assemblies has been on my wishlist too.

Another longtime wish for assemblies is a tree search tool. 

StephenG

The comments related to "Folders" use in a Part Studios and Assemblies is interesting, however, it would be better if it continued in a separate discussion thread.

Suggestion: Please start the thread with a clear description of what the issues are that precipitated folders being suggested as a solution. I think I know what the issues are, but I would like to see some clear consensus from the masses.

Given my understanding of what the issues are I do not see folders as an optimal solution. I would like to know more.     

Don_Van_Zile

ilya_baran said:

@StephenG
I agree that mate connectors need improvement (to be as useful as a general coordinate system) and we're working on it, but are you saying you'd rather us not have shipped "Mate Connector As Axis" until we've implemented other improvements?  I'm not sure what would be gained by that.  In any case, the ability to use a mate connector to establish a sketch is coming soon.

@StephenG I definitely see the groundwork being made towards this (Coordinate System/Mate Connector ) more and more and the quote above from @ilya_baran (what's in a name)

I've been slowly but surely going through all of the Learning Path Center training and tutorials etc... Below is another example of using the Mate Connector as an origin definition for In-Context creation of new Part Studio.