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Feature Patterns fail with Derived Sketches – core workflow broken
fortunat_schrämmli
Member Posts: 2 PRO
I have been using Onshape for about two years after decades with Solidworks, and I truly value its modern concepts like cloud collaboration, version control, and the master model approach.
But I am very disappointed to see that Feature Patterns based on Derived Sketches simply don’t work:
- The first instance works, but subsequent pattern instances fail.
- Even simple extrusions or holes cannot be patterned if they are driven by a derived sketch.
- There is no error message, which makes it even more confusing.
This is not a minor bug – it undermines one of Onshape’s most promising workflows: the Master PartStudio with derived sketches. If such a basic operation as patterning fails, the entire method becomes unusable in practice.
Is there any official statement on when this fundamental limitation will be resolved?
Comments
Can you provide a simple example in a public document? I’m sure there’s a way to achieve what you want to do.
Simon Gatrall | Product Development Specialist | Open For Work
Update:
After building a minimal example, I realized the issue is not caused by Derived Sketches but by the way the Feature Pattern itself works.
So the root cause seems to be that the pattern function does not handle downstream features consistently unless they are part of the pattern itself.
I originally thought this was a limitation of Derived Sketches, but it’s actually a behavior of the pattern function. Sorry for the confusion – but at least now we have a clearer picture of what’s happening.
But there is still two issues with Derived Sketches that has to be addressed. The function "Select tangent connected edges" doesn't work and the whole derived sketch can't be projected on a plane with "Use/Project" and selecting the name of the derived sketch.
Again, if you publicly share the document or a similar example, I bet there’s a solution.
Simon Gatrall | Product Development Specialist | Open For Work
This sounds like you have not checked "Apply per instance" option of feature pattern, when its not checked the feature pattern behaves like face pattern of faces created by selected features, and in your case the extrude without fillet would not create valid face pattern