Improvements to Onshape - November 22nd, 2024

NeilCooke · November 15

PART STUDIOS

FLATTEN SURFACES

Flatten surfaces is a new Analysis tool that generates a planar surface from one or more contiguous non-planar surfaces. This is useful to evaluate the flat (cut) shape for a paint mask, decal, or text curves. The result can be exported to PARASOLID, STL, DXF, or SVG file format.

https://onshape.wistia.com/medias/nr3mfu1m58?embedType=async&seo=true&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=1280

PAUSE REGENERATION

Part Studio regeneration can be temporarily paused while multiple configuration, variable table values, or feature parameters are modified.

https://onshape.wistia.com/medias/5v1garobzl?embedType=async&seo=true&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=1280

SKETCH PROFILE INSPECTOR

Tiny gaps between sketch entities are difficult to detect, especially in complex imported DXF files. The Profile inspector, a new sketch diagnostics tool, quickly finds all the open ends of non-construction geometry.

https://onshape.wistia.com/medias/dv93jx8ca1?embedType=async&seo=true&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=1280

SKETCH BEZIER CURVE

Elevating the degree of a Bezier sketch entity increases the number of control points while maintaining the exact geometry. Lowering the degree reduces the number of control points, preserving the geometry where possible and approximating the geometry as closely as possible when exact geometry cannot be maintained.

THICKNESS ANALYSIS

Thickness analysis is now available for Onshape Professional and Onshape Education Enterprise users.

DRAWINGS

PASTE AS TABLE WITH FORMATTING

Tables created by pasting cells from Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel now import text styles (font size, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough) and cell width and height. Note that if a style is applied to only part of the cell text, it is not preserved.

RELEASE MANAGEMENT

ADDING OBJECTS FROM OTHER DOCUMENTS

Onshape Professional users can now add parts, assemblies, drawings or files from other documents to a single release candidate and release them together.

https://onshape.wistia.com/medias/vur04lyhsi?embedType=async&seo=true&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=1280

RENDER STUDIO

LEGACY RENDER STUDIO BETA TABS ⚠️

Render Studio was officially released in Onshape 1.181 (May 17th, 2024). Access to the beta version of Render Studio will cease on February 29th, 2025 and all exisiting Render Studio beta tabs created prior to the official release will be automatically deleted on this date. Only rendered output created from those tabs will remain.

SELECT MATCHING INSTANCES

All instances of the same part or subassembly can now be selected by right-clicking and choosing Select matching instances, regardless of where they appear in the assembly structure.

ISOLATE TRANSFORMS AND PROJECTORS

All entities added to a Transform or Projector can now be isolated on screen with a simple right-click.

MOBILE

MERGE LINES ON iOS

Merge lines can now be displayed on an iOS device for a clear high-level overview of the development timeline.

LEARNING CENTER

CERTIFICATION

The Onshape Learning Center has upgraded the certification experience. Both exams are now fully embedded in the Learning Center and do not require navigation to a separate testing platform. The Certified Onshape Associate has also been upgraded with completely new data sets to test your CAD knowledge.

API QUICKSTART

Building off of our previously released Introduction to the Onshape API course, we have now added an Onshape REST API Quickstart video explaining how to create a simple application for personal use.

Please take a moment to try out these new features and improvements and leave your comments below. For a detailed list of all the changes in this update, please see the changelog.

Remember: The updates listed here are now live for all users when creating new Documents. Over the next few days, these features will also be available in Documents created before this update.

Caden_Armstrong · November 22

Christmas comes every three weeks with Onshape.
Pause regen! no longer do I need to include that option in slow/complex features. What a life saver.

Flatten is great, but its a bit annoying that it only exports. Post-flattening workflow is going to require a reimport of the file.
But still, super excited to see flatten get used. Opens up a lot of options that were going to be incredibly difficult with featurescript.

eric_pesty · November 22

Definitely some good stuff in here!
I'm a little bit puzzled by the flatten not being able to produce a surface in the part studio though… That seems like it would be useful… You can export but it creates a download, why not at least offer a "save as new tab". Even better why not just be a feature that generates the face so that it can update parametrically?

S1mon · November 22

Flatten is huge. I've needed that a number of times, but I agree with @Caden_Armstrong - I very much wish that it was able to generate geometry without a round-trip through an export/import. I have to assume that will come later?

Sketch profile inspector should really help a ton of people clean up DXFs. This is a great quality of life thing, and it (obviously to Onshape) comes up on the forums all the time.

Béziers raising/lowering cleanly is a very nice fix. Thank you! I'm glad my cranky response to the 1.188 release was addressed.

Pausing regen is great. It would be cool if it was more flexible about previewing the selection, the way @EvanReese 's Selection Fillet works with its pause regen built in. I suspect that would take some new Featurescript functionality to separate out a preview from a full blown regen.

joshtargo · November 22

great new additions, especially the sketch improvements!

S1mon · 12:29AM

Ok. Flatten is one of the best new things that was just added for free to Onshape!

Here's a flattened version of a part where I had simulated fabric wrapping some molded foam for a headband of a product. It does take a while to process this, but it's so much better than having to use another package.

The "origin" and mate connector selections are a little weird. They're not used in the demo, but in order to have the flat pattern appear where I would like, it sometimes helps to have the surface split at the "origin". Then add a mate connector at that same location, but with the Z pointing into the part.

Also not shown in the demo above, is the facet view, which is also helpful. You can see how the surfaces have been tessellated to simulate the stretching/flattening.

I'm looking forward to more development and in depth demos. Actually I just looked, and here's @GregBrown with a more full demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4HW8y5IgFY

danny_payne · 12:54AM

The flatten surfaces and the sketch profile inspector will be exciting to try out. Great updates.

EvanReese · 1:13AM

So many goodies! Pause regeneration is particularly exciting! Flatten has also come up for me a decent amount and this will be super helpful so I don't have to leave Onshape to get it.

glen_dewsbury · 1:38AM

Kudos OS. Some vary nice updates today, especially flatten. I like the spread sheet connectivity as well and hope it propagates into other areas as well.☺️

aris_setyawan · 3:14AM

the flatten surface feature that has been long awaited, it would be better to have an option to export to tab and the result of this flattening to become a part or surface so it can be modified again.

Konst_Sh · 7:30AM

Suspending on regeneration is great as well as flattening. Having the flatten feature with in-part studio surface result would be pretty useful though, especially if it would be possible to create inverse transformation of the objects associated with flattened surface to the curved one.

GWS50 · 7:48AM

Flatten surface and from a mesh too…..wow thank you that is unexpected but very welcome

aeromorrison · 4:31PM

Yes! Flatten surface! This affects my workflow nearly every day, so this is huge. I agree with the others regarding building the flattened geometry right into Onshape to keep with the core data model, but this is a huge step. I also hope to see this paired up with more robust sheet metal forming functionality which would round out a full end-to-end workflow.

The other improvements are awesome as well! It's so good to have these updates every few weeks as I think it really helps to get new stuff into workflows right away rather than monster releases once per year that are difficult to fully digest.

bryan_lagrange · 5:19PM

Big plus with sketch profile inspector.

With the launch of flatten surfaces does this mean we are getting closer to the release of sheet metal loft??? crossing fingers……..

EvanReese · 5:55PM

https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/comment/110009#Comment_110009

My thoughts exactly. It seems like this functionality could converge on something like a mix of sheet metal flat view and UV unwrapping for texture mapping. I could certainly see a "Flatten" feature that behaves like the sheet metal feature, and would open up a lot of modeling power. This could also make complex decals possible across multiple surfaces of any kind. I get that this is likely an order of magnitude more work to do though, and I'm very grateful to get the flattening we see today.

dirk_van_der_vaart · 9:35PM

Flatten surfaces, one small step. Next step flatten cone's etc.

Export to SVG

Next step import SVG???

In 4 week's it is christmas ???