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Improvements to Onshape - June 6th, 2025
cody_armstrong
Moderator, Onshape Employees, Developers, csevp Posts: 221 
It's been three weeks and we are back again with an exciting new update. It includes two of our most popular requests and a number of quality of life improvements. Let's dig in.
CAD IMPROVEMENTS
WIDTH MATE
You will find a new Width mate in Onshape assemblies. This new mate makes centering parts in the assembly easier than ever.SHEET METAL CONE
The Thicken option in the Sheet metal model feature now supports conical faces. This gives you the ability to create conical geometry that unfolds.HORIZONTAL SCROLLBAR ON BILL OF MATERIALS
The BOM horizontal scrollbar is available without scrolling to the bottom.
HORIZONTAL RESIZE OF INSERT DIALOG
The Insert dialog, used in many places to add entities (for example, to add instances in Assemblies), can now be resized horizontally.
DRAWING IMPROVEMENTS
TANGENT ARC
Earlier this year we announced the ability to create parametric sketches in drawings. With this update, we are adding the ability to sketch a tangent arc in a drawing.CALLOUT JUSTIFICATION
You can now control text justification of callout items on a drawing. You will find a new Text justification option under Callouts in Drawing properties.EDUCATION ENTERPRISE
PCB STUDIO AND CAM STUDIO AVAILABILITY
Onshape Education Enterprise users now have access to PCB Studio and CAM Studio. For more information, see the Education Community category in the forums.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.
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Comments
First party sheet metal cones. My dream.
Well this is indeed a bunch of great features and quality of life improvements!
I hope that Width mate will handle drafted features. That's one of the biggest frustrations with the between entities mate connector.
Horizontal resize!!!!!😆
Width mate! Thank you! I'll use it immediately.
Width mate is yet another thing I didn't know I needed, but the Onshape team did and gave it to me anyway!
The Onsherpa | Reach peak Onshape productivity
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So, on further investigation of the width mate, it solves one issue with the between entities mate connector - it will accurately find the mid-plane of two non-parallel mate connectors. What it doesn't do is constrain the parts fully. That wasn't 100% obvious in the demo video. It's just a planar mate.
What I thought it would do would be to (internally) construct two finite length axes with midpoints, and then make both axes coincident and the two midpoints coincident.
The parts in this screen shot below have a width mate, but there's no way that I can figure out to add another mate that will put that roller where I want, without adding reference geometry to the parts.
If the two flanges are parallel, I can add a cylindrical mate on one end and the parts are controlled nicely, but the minute the flanges are angled (e.g. for ease of assembly or manufacture) then the cylindrical mate fails. I guess what I'm looking for is a combo of ball/cylindrical mate where one mate connector would describe a point and the other an axis, and the axis would always go through the point.
I see that assembly mirror function hanging out there too. Flipping across the top plane was my last instinct after the right plane and top plane. Is that more stable for orientability of mates?
Hoo boy. This sheet metal update is pretty fantastic:
Horizontal scrollbar on BOM - I have been waiting years for this !!! Do configuration tables work the same way? If not, they should.
Good job Onshape team - much appreciated.
May I please have an extrude mode (in line with New Add Subtract Intersect) That removes the selected face then extrudes the selected face the same depth as a new extrude. This is something I find myself doing a lot and it would save a ton of time. Thanks.
It sort of sounds like you are describing the "thicken" feature?
Need to play around with the width mate, although at first glance I was surprised it doesn't seem to have "limits" so it seems like it will another mate to lock things in place, which seems less than ideal…
Cone Sheet Metal BABY! This is Huge. Seems so small but the math can be intense
Sheet Metal Cone is great! Thank you!
@S1mon as it turns out that you CAN solve for this condition if the cylindrical mate is appplied to the center mate connector the hole on the angled part and not the face mate connectors.
https://www.veed.io/view/c36407cd-d64c-4230-9043-1416e0f4404c?panel=share for a quick video on width mate on a non-perpendicular situation as you mention @S1mon and sample public document: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/f333c7dbc8816de5feab30cb/w/b1d1b29ddc4fb864ef48a474/e/d33cbebc8fab347ed742c337 Let us know if that works ;-)
I saw it above, but yeah the same problem that the BOM scrollbar had previously still exists for the configuration lists. I encounter a lot of long configuration lists when working on a part library and I hope the fix gets implemented there soon as well.
Sorry @mlaflecheCAD in production we never have that kind of holes in a bended part, I know this is off topic but please use a better example.
Have wanted sheet metal conical features for years.. thank you!
Horizontal scroll bars, sheet metal cone, and width mate will get used right away.
Excellent point @dirk_van_der_vaart ! here is how I would do that as if it were a true sheet metal part, with the hole stamped normal to the face https://www.veed.io/view/4e500722-a69d-4649-8421-241086045978?panel=share : This uses mate connector belonging to the bracket as an axis to mate the pin to, then the width mate is applied. There are other ways of adding width mates too which I will write some info up on for a coming tech tip.
I created a branch in the document I shared earlier. I added configurable angle to test a range of possibilities as well…https://cad.onshape.com/documents/f333c7dbc8816de5feab30cb/w/6bb72f8bd203adb0d2e6e368/e/d33cbebc8fab347ed742c337?configuration=Wall_Angle%3D0.3490658503988659%2Bradian&renderMode=0&uiState=6844b0d3977cfd4711e52ea4
Might just be me, but a little deflated about this update.
Nice to get sheet metal for cone but quite limited to concentric reducers, need sheet metal loft for offset reducers and square to round etc
Support ticket open for 3 years and 2 years since the sneak peek
great improvement, thanks to Onshape Team
but this cannot work on eccentric designs, I hope in the future it can be more powerful for eccentric designs in the field of sheet metal,
next loft bend 😁
Width mate, much needed! Sheet metal cone, also much needed! Really nice update.
Horizontal Scrollbar on BOM, Lets goo!!
Sheet metal cone to flat pattern big ++
Twitter: @BryanLAGdesign
I am guessing sheet metal cone to flat is the first step to sheet metal loft command.
Twitter: @BryanLAGdesign
I'm not one of the devs at Onshape but I've bullied their sheet metal kernel enough to make some educated guesses how things work under the hood. The main barrier to lofted sheet metal is guaranteeing that the seed surfaces defining the sheet metal bodies are developable and zero gaussian curvature underneath. Cylinders are a developable surface because their curvature is inherently parallel to their axis of revolution. Cones are an inherently developable surface because they consist of straight line geometry pointing towards their central axis, but these UV curves are no longer parallel in their unfolded state. Lofted faces don't necessarily carry zero gaussian curvature depending on the inputs used so they need to be evaluated at runtime to check the curvature across the entire surface to determine developability. Or you allow non-zero gaussian curvature but evaluate everything piecewise as the surface flatten tool does, but now your script is computationally insane depending on how granular your simulation is.
The funny thing is lofted sheet metal technically already is supported if your underlying surfaces have no draft or twist to them. The only first party way to make the geometry is using the extrude option for sheet metal but I've got a script that does a surface extrusion and a replace face on any input body to force label the valid spliney faces as extrusion geometry so the sheet metal convert tool will unfold the parts and give you a flat pattern.
Geometrically there's no difference between the seed part's faces before the custom face fixer script runs and after, it's just that extrusions have a geometric neutral axis that can be read and trusted implicitly by the sheet metal kernel, where lofted faces need that extra interrogation step.
The 3d side of the sheet metal engine already just works for the real complicated twisty cases if you can set things up so the feature runs in a single convert step (and disable all geometry checks in your own custom fork of the sheet metal tool), it just fails to do the unfolding stage at the moment.
As for the demo shown in that tech tip, the piecewise segmented loft approach has its own limitations for faceting. I've attempted to modify another version of someone's custom faceted loft script but that approach can fail in cases where the segments of curves on one side of the loft can't be aligned with like segments on the opposite side and require triangulation instead of a flat parallel extrusion face. This especially happens in offset lofting cases. I never got around to researching fully how to handle those cases, but I imagine the devs encountered a similar hangup and that's why we still have yet to see that tool hit the core feature set.
Good Updates