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Improvements to Onshape - April 4th, 2025

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Comments

  • S1monS1mon Member Posts: 3,298 PRO

    I'm late to the party, but this is a very substantial release with some great improvements. I'm especially excited to dig into the AI Advisor and Constraint manager, but also very happy to see some detailed drawing and rendering improvements.

  • PattabiPattabi Member Posts: 51 ✭✭

    Great improvements again Onshape Team 👏

    The Onshape AI Advisor (Beta) and Sketch Constraint Manager features look very useful.

  • PattabiPattabi Member Posts: 51 ✭✭

    KEYBOARD SHORTCUT IMPROVEMENTS

    Keyboard shortcuts can be assigned to Collapse all in list and Expand all in list.

    Which list is being referenced? Functionality to collapse the instances list in the Assembly/Part Studio would be beneficial. See the image below.

    image.png
  • andrew_troupandrew_troup Member, Mentor Posts: 1,585 ✭✭✭✭✭

    Because of the ab initio decision to fold Merge (in particular), but also Coincident, Collinear and Coradial relations (in SldWorks terms) into a single undifferentiated Onshape "Coincident" relation, linked with Internal and External relations not being overtly distinguishable, the lack of this newly added auditing and troubleshooting tool had become (for me) literally a show stopper.

    I used to think it was Einstein who famously said "Everything should be made as simple as possible but no simpler", but in fact I think it was inspired by something he wrote or said along those lines, but not phrased nearly as simply !!!.

    I think in general Onshape have steered, from the start, a happily chosen, and very well adjusted course along the difficult boundary between the turbulent ocean currents of "as simple as possible" and "simpler than usable".
    Hopefully this happy navigation will long continue, to enable Onshape to avoid the bloating and the cascading legacy complications which so many capable and far-evolving modelling apps have until now seemed unable to avoid.

    But the relations difficulty I mentioned above was one of a few important exceptions, for the tasks I tend to find myself tackling.

    The others mostly relate to drawings, and filing, rather than modelling.

    In particular, I found eventually I could not justify the productivity penalty of having to wade through literally dozens of anonymous, identically titled and depicted relations for (in extreme cases) a single entity, along with the cognitive burden of doing so, and it was hard to fully enjoy dealing with those limitations while knowing how easy it could be.

    So I could not be more delighted with this update, and greatly look forward to being able to use Onshape for significant chunks of projects of my own.

    Muchos Kudos: to the development team, and more generally: for the brilliance, expandability and enrichability of Onshape's founding concepts, including the recursive and transparent continuous-improvement architecture.

  • Max_KlugeMax_Kluge Member Posts: 21 ✭✭

    Strong update!

    Finally a bigger push in the drawing improvements! Love it!

  • Kevin_CowlesKevin_Cowles Member, Onshape Employees Posts: 34 PRO

    The Assembly instance list and Part Studio Features list is exactly what it's referring to. This update added keyboard shortcuts for both, which can be found in your Account Settings

  • Cody_BogusCody_Bogus Member Posts: 1 PRO

    Great improvements, although I have one question. Did this update remove the ability to approve your own releases? If we had to touch something up before I would create a release for approval, and if it was one dimension that happened to change we would fix it ourselves and approve the release ourselves, now it seems the option to approve your own release is missing. Unless something changed on our end that I'm unaware of, it seems that this option disappeared with this update.

  • mlaflecheCADmlaflecheCAD Member, Onshape Employees, Developers Posts: 181
    edited April 9

    Please check the "Company" or "Enterprise" settings under Release Management, "Do not allow creator as approver" perhaps it was switched on. Admins can override this setting as well on Release.

    image.png
    Regards,
    Mike LaFleche   @mlaflecheCAD
  • PattabiPattabi Member Posts: 51 ✭✭

    Strangely, it wasn't working when I commented, but it's okay now. Thanks! I've been waiting for this feature for a while.

  • Derek_Van_Allen_BDDerek_Van_Allen_BD Member Posts: 34 PRO

    @Jason_S If you guys could silently add 0 gaussian curvature spline face support to the sheet metal kernel next update like cones got added this time that would be cool too. Technically sheet metal extrude already allows for the geometry but I use almost exclusively sheet metal convert for my projects because it's a much faster and more stable workflow.

  • Jason_SJason_S Moderator, Onshape Employees, Developers Posts: 219

    So the input is a cylindrical face, and you'd pick a split location (because we need an end to unfold) with manipulator handles or a suggestion from vertices?

    Support & QA
  • Derek_Van_Allen_BDDerek_Van_Allen_BD Member Posts: 34 PRO

    Might be useful to just share an example of the geometry we're working with.

    image.png


    https://cad.onshape.com/documents/ab8ce79b33d2a61ca70e5fd6/w/3ec0c71521637162baad6f01/e/36781ed0e3558a3488f969f1

    This is a rough approximation of the geometric core of one of our catalog products that was drafted in Solidworks originally with lofted sheet metal functionality, and we were going to refactor it into an Onshape native design. Technically the sheet metal engine is capable of resolving this geometry already if we skip the lofty faces and create an extrude separately but that's several extra steps that aren't stable when upstream features change.

    Ideally it would be a one click convert, but as demonstrated in the cone tab at the front of the document it's not a big deal if we have to specify rips to get things to unfold.

    The square to circle tab is just to demonstrate that the 3d corner forming is working perfectly even without the 2d flattening support yet

  • andrew_kleinertandrew_kleinert Member Posts: 91 PRO

    There are some good improvements here.

    A suggestion regarding the constraint manager - for me, the main reason I would use this new functionality is because of inferred horizontal / vertical constraints that sneak into my sketches.

    Sifting through sketches trying to find inferred constraints that shouldn't be there isn't fun - made all the more frustrating because it's a feature I never use and would strongly prefer wasn't there. If OnShape offered the ability to turn off horizontal / vertical constraint inferencing I would happily turn it off and for me it would be a quality of life improvement.

  • S1monS1mon Member Posts: 3,298 PRO

    @andrew_kleinert Hold down shift as you sketch lines. That will avoid it inferring constraints. Also, the constraint icons always show up on screen, so you can see when it's going to make the assumption. They may be brief, and sometimes it will grab things that are far away that you really weren't expecting, but it will show the icon.

  • andrew_kleinertandrew_kleinert Member Posts: 91 PRO

    Thanks @S1mon,

    The icons do show, usually I catch them but clearly sometimes I do miss them.

    I'm struggling to make the "shift" habitual - inferring the coincident constraint is something I use a lot of, it seems intuitive and wouldn't want to turn that off.

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