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Comments
Flatten surface is an important capability and I am happy to see it implemented, though as others, I would prefer if it could be a feature that would create a surface body.
For now though, It means that another reason for keep visiting our Solidworks license is no longer valid.
Great updates, thank you Onshape team!
You actually can flatten cones! But I would really like it to be implemented in the sheet metal tools.
Easily one of the best upgrades I have come across.
Thanks for all the feedback on this new feature. If you have improvement requests like the one you mention here, we'd love to get them in the system the normal way…
@sebastian_glanzner my Extract Flat FS does sheet metal.
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/ee5fe3705045d8cf9e3fe478/w/6c8344d774ce4c4c0e00ad7e/e/2e3c34069cc7000fbe02adb9
Very nice update. I like the sketch profile inspector and pause regen!
I created an IR for flatten surface to be a feature… Go vote for it!
https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/25980/make-flatten-surface-into-a-feature-that-creates-a-surface-in-the-part-studio#latest
Christmas is early this year, thickness analysis tool 🤤 amazing!
Checking the changelog, there shall be an update regarding pasting tables from Google Sheets or MS Excel. There's definitely some improvement done, but a lot is still missing.
Changelog: Support styling (bold, italic, cell colors ..) and cell width/height on paste from Excel/GSheets in Drawings
Thanks for looking into this 🙂
Very nice update!
Some of my favorites this round, the very special ones are bold or italic :)
I think the Onshape crew was hoping their name gets brought up this year at the Thanksgiving table when everyone says what they are thankful for 😉
Can't wait to see what they do for Christmas, unless they take a well-deserved break for December's release.
A number of users have asked why flatten surface cannot be used in downstream features without reimporting and when that will be fixed.
We are planning to make it easier to use the flat by allowing export-to-tab, as well as further "comfort" enhancements.
What we are not currently planning to do is to allow flattening to be an automatically regenerating parametric feature that produces the flat surface: the algorithm is quite complex and numerically sensitive and the requirement to keep old versions regenerating perfectly will hamper our ability to make improvements in the future.
Agreed—this could be useful for molds or jigs.
Flatten, pause regen, sketch inspector for small gaps, and useful bezier degree reduction are all relevant for a current project.
Not the first but maybe the most dramatic instance of JIT functionality in Onshape. :)
Oh I'll definitely be using that flatten surfaces tool in the future. I've always wanted that! And I have to deal with complex dxfs all the time, so the sketch inspector will be great.
One more thing on surface flatten: I'd like to acknowledge and thank Michael Rabinovich, Roi Poranne, Daniele Panozzo, and Olga Sorkine-Hornung for their excellent paper "Scalable Locally Injective Mappings," which served as the basis for our surface flattening algorithm.
@ilya_baran Thanks for sharing that. It's fascinating to see the background for new functionality like this.
@S1mon
A guess about why OS have done it this way …
… It provides OS with the flexibility to change functionality of this later. They can change assumptions, change default behaviour, change functionality, or even add functionality without having to worry about backward compatibility.
If they had allowed it to be integrated into the parametric tree, and then made changes to functionality later, users would rightfully get very upset if a parametric model that was perfectly fine yesterday / last week / last month / last year is today either materially different or even broken for no apparent reason other than a software update. OS could create model migration filters to handle changes (as they have done in the past), but that adds more development, testing, processing (and risk) that is probably better spent elsewhere.
There is the possibility that the export - import functionality that has been implemented here could result in a different outcome between versions, but as this is a manual process under user control, there is far less risk of this leading to user angst. Us users expect to have to fix something up whenever we re-import it.
Edit: What Ilya said.
Until today I thought the new ‘Profile inspector’ button in the Sketch panel would only work on imported DXF sketches, because on open self-drawn sketches the button did not respond. Until I discovered that there is another button that needs to be pressed before the inspector panel appears.
Is there a reason for this (second) extra button? Can’t it just be dropped and just let the button in the Sketch panel do its expected job?
My guess is that they are planning on adding other sketch "diagnostic tools" under that button, with "profile inspector" being the first… (kind of like the "analysis tools" expands into curve/surface, dihedral, zebra stripes, etc…)
I hadn't realized this but that has interesting implications!
Flatten surfaces is my new hero, especially for some sheet metal work from external CAD models, etc…
I just recently learned that we are able to "convert" an imported sheet metal part into an Onshape SM part. You just have to use the Sheet Metal tool > Thicken > select the main face > make sure thickness and direction are correct > Tangent propagation checkbox. This creates a new part but then you have the ability to add flanges, tabs, etc.
Hi Lucas, thanks for you advise. Our team still doing that while some of other departments would want to get 1-3 clicks to get the dxf from our old CAD model from SolidWorks before. But yes, good approaches both ways
Thanks to the whole Onshape team for the new analysis tool.
I have been waiting for this for years.
I did not need such a powerful tool, something simpler would have made me happy and your great community. But I understand your actual professional compromises.