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Improvements to Onshape - July 18th, 2025
Roy_Mutalik
Member, Onshape Employees Posts: 39 
Welcome to the new release!
This release contains a wide variety of features and improvements touching virtually all areas of the product: Configurations, Assemblies, Surfacing, Drawings, Data Management, as well as CAM and Render Studio! We hope there's something out there for everyone!
As you might expect, these new standards are correctly called out in Part studio hole tables, as well as hole callouts and thread representations in Drawings.
RENDER STUDIO IMPROVEMENTS
Panoramic scenes (such as the default ones provided in Render studio) are otherwise complicated to create, and often require expensive physical hardware to photograph. Being able to define them yourself in a Render studio allows for unmatched control of your lighting environment, for both total unique or very consistent results across multiple renderings.
For full documentation on this feature, please visit the help page.
This release contains a wide variety of features and improvements touching virtually all areas of the product: Configurations, Assemblies, Surfacing, Drawings, Data Management, as well as CAM and Render Studio! We hope there's something out there for everyone!
CAD IMPROVEMENTS
CONFIGURATION INPUTS IMPROVEMENTS
There have been several usability improvements to Onshape configurations, specifically around defining and managing your configuration inputs.- The assigned default value for a configuration input is now displayed in the configurations panel
- Configured dimensions can be renamed
- List values can be reordered by drag-and-drop
- Configuration inputs can be reordered by drag-and-drop
- You can expand or collapse all configuration inputs in one click
ASSEMBLY INTERFERENCE DETECTION - TOP LEVEL ONLY
You can now filter assembly interference detection results to show top-level interferences only.MARK-UP IN REPLY COMMENT
Reply comments can now include mark-ups, attachments, and can tag entities in the same way an initial comment can.ASSEMBLY PERFORMANCE PANEL IMPROVEMENTS
The Assembly Performance panel displays an icon when it detects longer than expected mate solve times. Expanding the panel will display a message at the bottom, providing suggestions as to how to improve mate solve times.TRIM FRAME WITH MATE CONNECTOR
The Frame trim feature now supports the use of a Mate connector as a face selection with which to trim.DXF / DWG EXPORT UNITS
You can now override the default workspace or drawing units when exporting a DXF or DWG.STRAIGHT/PARALLEL PIPE TAP THREADS
You will now find Straight pipe tap thread types in the Hole feature.As you might expect, these new standards are correctly called out in Part studio hole tables, as well as hole callouts and thread representations in Drawings.
SHEET METAL FLAT PATTERN VIEWS - PROPERTIES
In the Drawing properties, under views, you will now find several additional controls for the line styles and colors of different sheet metal features in your flat pattern views.SURFACING IMPROVEMENTS
CURVE / SURFACE ANALYSIS IMPROVEMENTS
The Curve/Surface Analysis tool now displays control points, knot points, polynomial degree, and number of spans.ENCLOSE - PREVIEW GAPS
The Enclose feature now previews any gaps on screen that would prevent the feature from rebuilding.DATA MANAGEMENT IMPROVEMENTS
STRUCTURE VIEW IMPROVEMENTS
Structure view now shows an icon when a contained reference has been been obsoleted. This is also true for referenced drawings when using the Show drawings feature. Additionally, an export icon is available directly from the Structure view page, allowing you to export individual elements without having to open the containing document.COPY LINK FROM VERSION AND HISTORY
You can now directly copy the URL to any point in the Version and history graph, without having to open that node.SORT FOLDERS IN GRID VIEW
While in grid view, you may now sort your folders alphabetically, reverse-alphabetically, or by last modified.NOT REVISION MANAGED - PART STATUS
Any parts that are marked in their properties as Not revision managed now display this part status in the assembly instance list properties.RENDER STUDIO IMPROVEMENTS
PANORAMIC AND STEREO RENDERING
You can now build and export panoramic exr/hdr files for use in a render studio scene. These panoramic renderings represent and the environmental lighting for a scene that you can then use to render your subject in.Panoramic scenes (such as the default ones provided in Render studio) are otherwise complicated to create, and often require expensive physical hardware to photograph. Being able to define them yourself in a Render studio allows for unmatched control of your lighting environment, for both total unique or very consistent results across multiple renderings.
For full documentation on this feature, please visit the help page.
DRAG-AND-DROP APPEARANCES
The default behavior when dragging and dropping appearances to the graphic area has changed. The appearance will now default to being applied to the entire part, rather than the individual face.ASSEMBLY FOLDER STRUCTURE
Render studio now maintains the assembly folder structure of instances that you have defined in your Onshape assembly.CAM STUDIO IMPROVEMENTS
TOOLBAR UI
The CAM Studio interface has been updated to a toolbar-based design. Inserting, Defining jobs, Machines, and Setups will feel much more intuitive to an Onshape-based environment by selecting features from a single toolbar across the top of the graphics area.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
Configuration updates! 😍 Happy early birthday to me! 😎
Way to go!
All of this is great. Of immediate use to us: Configurations, pipe threads, assembly performance, render studio (all of it), revision part status in sidebar.
That surface analysis improvement is gonna come in real handy for validation as I continue my work on Edit Surface.
Lots of good stuff here
Ummmmm…. Search seems not to be working.
Wow this is a great update!!
These will certainly be of benefit in my daily work immediately:
Configurations updates, Assembly Interference detections option, Mark up reply, Curve/Surface Eval tool, Enclose identification, Copy Link, and Not revision managed
For naming configuration dimensions I would like to visually see those names displayed near the dimension while editing the sketch. Working in our main profile sketches often times we use a dozen or so configured dimensions, it is difficult to find them in the configuration table. A "jump/go to" option would be cool - click the dimension in the sketch and index to the column in the table.
Searching at the top Company level yields zero results.
If I go into 'recently opened' or a folder, it works and populates.
@Tony_C_ Yes are aware of an issue with search:
https://status.onshape.com/incidents/ch70j37whngv
All good stuff! Configuration input improvements and surface analysis improvements will get usage from me right away. I look forward to using the other changes as well.
OK!!!
Found some cases where the new surface analysis tool isn't displaying the control points or knots of the selected face.
Working fine
Not working
One of my custom features seems able to extract these points in the cases where the analysis tool isn't displaying things, might be helpful for diagnostics.
@Derek_Van_Allen_BD I've created a support ticket for you. Please share your document with support on that ticket.
@Derek_Van_Allen_BD the new Curve/Surface analysis shows the additional diagnostics only for
SPLINEtype surfaces and curves. There are a number of other surface types (and they are listed here https://cad.onshape.com/FsDoc/library.html#module-surfacetype.gen.fs ) for which we do not currently show the diagnostic.In your case above you have likely used
evApproximateBSplineSurfacein order to return a true (and approximated)SPLINEsurface. We are not doing that approximation in the analysis tool, hence there is nothing to show for the Degree, CPs, Spans.This is similarly the case with curves. We only show the diagnostics for
SPLINEcurves. Somewhat confusingly there are some curve types that look like splines, but are not exactly splines (examples are Intersection curves,Projected curves, to name a couple of examples). In order to "see" their underlying math it is necessary to convert them/reapproximate them. You can do this interactvely with andEdit curvefeature, for example, and of course do it programmatically inside a custom feature.Let me know if there is more info required!
Lots of great update!
Finally, Mark-up in reply comment!
Drag and drop in configuration will really come in handy!
Naming sketch dimensions as well, and having the name also show up in the constraint manager is a nice touch. I basically never configured dimension directly because of that (always used a variable). It just seems unfortunate that this can only be accessed for configured dimensions. Naming dimensions directly from a sketch (so that it would show up correctly named already when adding to a config) would be helpful and has been requested a number of times… I hope that can be implemented at some point!
Having the folders in render studio is very much welcome! Getting better with every release, can get better handling of composite parts soon (pretty please?)?
Yes! One of the things I really miss in Onshape (as a prior Creo user) is the ability to give sketch dimensions variable names and then base other sketch dimensions off of those variables within the sketch. It allows for really powerful parametric sketching within the context of the sketch itself without clogging up the rest of the model with defined variables.
the configuration update is great!
I wasn't thinking that far, more about documenting design intent…
That said I do sometimes miss the ability to relate dimensions to each other withing a sketch so a "local variable" would be useful for this…
For anything that will be referenced downstream in a different feature it seems like a better idea to use an explicit variable though so I wouldn't mind if it was just accessible within the one sketch!
EMERGENCY STATE DECLARED!! SEARCH IN ONSHAPE DIED!!! OUR PRODUCTION IS INTERRUPTED; WE CAN'T FIND ANY DRAWINGS!!!
Configuration improvements are very welcome. I can't imagine managing some of the more complex configs I've seen demoed without some of them,
Copy link for a version is a nice shortcut.
Render studio improvements are all moving in the right direction.
In the change log, there's "Improve bullets and number indent behavior for notes in Drawings". Does anyone know what this is? It doesn't sound like just a bug fix.
I assume that naming dimensions is a hint of something beyond this. I agree that it's a little odd that the only way to get to it is configurations or digging through the sketch inspector. It seems like something that might eventually be cross-connected with variables as well.
Search is not working in Enterprise.
I'm guessing some of this stuff is part of the required groundwork for MBD as well (like the tolerancing in the hole feature, I would expect this to eventually show up in other places, including sketch dimensions…)
Such a good update, I'm in the middle of reworking an overly configurable part so this will help so much!
@S1mon for me, I know I've had a long-term issue with numbered lists in notes. Specifically, if you add flags to items in a numbered list, the spacing of the list goes haywire (usually, adding spaces before and after every line in the list). I've gotten used to adding flags (say, to identify specific inspection criteria for inspection items) then repairing the line spacing, which is several extra clicks. I haven't tried this yet, but I'd be happy if this is fixed!