Welcome to the Onshape forum! Ask questions and join in the discussions about everything Onshape.
First time visiting? Here are some places to start:- Looking for a certain topic? Check out the categories filter or use Search (upper right).
- Need support? Ask a question to our Community Support category.
- Please submit support tickets for bugs but you can request improvements in the Product Feedback category.
- Be respectful, on topic and if you see a problem, Flag it.
If you would like to contact our Community Manager personally, feel free to send a private message or an email.
Comments
+1 @TooTallToby to get in here. As per the rules, no Ivan exploits!
Ramon Yip | glassboard.com
Someone needs to model the whole thing with a custom feature that has no UI and only makes this exact part. (with math, not imports obvs)
The Onsherpa | Reach peak Onshape productivity
www.theonsherpa.com
Technically, that feature has zero opBoolean usage whatsoever. What it does is smuggle illegal sheet metal geometry into the 2d flat pattern view from the 3d view and skips all the manufacturing checks of the normal engine. Subtractive operations on planar surfaces only.
Don't tell the devs.
Derek Van Allen | Engineering Consultant | MeddlerSo I should have mentioned in the initial post, but my method for checking for same-ness of the initial input part is to run a matching bodies query with Query Variable Plus, which has more robust geometry evaluation than pure mass properties evaluation.
Derek Van Allen | Engineering Consultant | Meddler@Derek_Van_Allen_BD: got those forbidden Booleans taken care of. it was painful in one instance, just as you intended!
@Derek_Van_Allen_BD The shaped is complete and ready to ship to the winner of CAD battle #1
Twitter: @BryanLAGdesign
Just crossed the halfway point in this competition, strong submissions so far but still plenty of time for people to cook up some cursed feature trees and plenty of room for improvement
(regression?)over what people have done up to this point if you're bold enough.If you're reading this and have yet to make a submission, here is some (unfortunately) real-world inspiration. Below is a list of things I have seen in actual production models that you could apply:
Keep up the terrible work everyone!
Derek Van Allen | Engineering Consultant | MeddlerJust did a way worse one using routing curve as the only curve creation tool and ruled surface as the only geometry creation tool, and transform as the only patterning tool. No, sketches or solids used (until Enclose). I also opted to leave a ton of missing references and failed features. Makes the feature list look like I'm less up tight.
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/70f550586b27aa6e3bf80866/w/87953cc4b98976f216b607f2/e/011e4a19f70e52f35af11f7a
The Onsherpa | Reach peak Onshape productivity
www.theonsherpa.com
Congrats, that's a fine mess.
@Derek_Van_Allen_BD wrote: "
"
Hey, make no jokes on that! That is not funny. Yesterday, I received a phone call from someone in my town asking me to come over and help, because "My model has exploded and now everyting is gone!" The guy is on Fusion. I drove over to his place and had a look. What you proposed is exactly what he did: Patching one issue with yet anoter issue and yet a few more on top. To add to the mess, he obviously switched history on and off at irregular intervals as he went on and also deleted individual features deliberately. I didn't know that was even possible. The whole model was in fact completely destroyed, and he made no versions to go back to, only saved some STEP exports as "backups" locally, of course including all the damage in different combinations, and he worked for days in a single session.
So, this is to say: Reality strikes back, and as it stands now, he is my inofficial winner of the Best of the worst Competition (Northern German League). It'll be hard and painful to top that! ;0)
Okay, inspired by what I saw yesterday, here's my entry:
https://cad.onshape.com/documents/a2c036d694ddf06c748a1cbb/w/f4f105d026f325bf616e8833/e/0ea9b9d430f224fd2b2081bb?renderMode=0&uiState=696cf9426370003b337fb085
I did in fact use some features, but tried to do it in the least meaningful manner, and never in a straight and targeted way or hardly for what they were meant to be used. I used booleans for things that could have been done 'cheaper' in many other ways, for example when creating a pin by booling away a slab from another slab that had a hole in it, only to use the pin obtained to create more holes by more booleans. And if a sketch may appear fully defined, I did not do it on purpose and it's pure coincidence. I made round things out of slab primitives. I also used an awful lot of transforms and deleted a lot of stuff. Also, I used a special Sawblade Feature to split solids at different angles. As a designer, you gotta take tinto account what tools they do have in the shop, don't you?
@martin_kopplow all of the crimes in that list are real things that I've seen people on my team do. Though I suppose I am guilty of giving them advice along the lines of "You see all that yellow in the feature tree? You know what yellow means? That the model built successfully, send it" so I can't hold it against all of them. Except the one that based the core of their whole catalog standard on the backside of the right plane and forced me to redraw the whole dang cabinet line from scratch. That one I'll never let go.
I am tempted to relax the rules a little to allow this submission because there's an elegance in execution on display here that I think ought to be appreciated. I mean look at this:
Marvelous.
Derek Van Allen | Engineering Consultant | Meddler@EvanReese you deviated a little bit away from the front pocket geometry with that squared face instead of following the curve of the main clamp part like the reference doc, but aside from that this is a fantastic sketchless example. I'm glad we got at least one Routing Curve example in here, there was a moment in the development of some of my curve utilities scripts that I thought about using Routing Curve's fillet capabilities to draw 3d curve arcs since there's no native function for that. Was gonna overdraw some lines and remove the straight bits much like your example does. In the end I couldn't get that to work in a continuous chain so my arc utilities just draws temporary sketch planes and then removes the construction objects to get the pathing to work.
It's interesting that the ruled surfaces for the circular bits evaluate as B spline surfaces instead of cylindrical surfaces even though the top and bottom edges evaluate as circular arcs and it's got a well defined extrusion direction.
This explains why I couldn't use a ruled surface operation for my sheet metal tab and slot feature and why the boolean kept failing on the circular tabs. I never realized they didn't come out truly circular. I'll have to keep this in mind next time I'm scripting with it. That does mean that this probably won't pass the Matching Bodies query in the end because the surface definitions aren't the same, but you'd probably pass the mass properties evaluation used by the CAD Challenges app to grade submissions with this part once that pocket gets fixed.
Derek Van Allen | Engineering Consultant | Meddler@martin_kopplow Your model is viscerally repugnant. In all my years I have never witnessed such an odious feature tree. It is truly horrendous.
The Onsherpa | Reach peak Onshape productivity
www.theonsherpa.com
@Derek_Van_Allen_BD I thought that was an interesting learning too. As for the model not matching, you're not going to believe this, but there was a feature error in the model that prevented it from being perfect. It's perfect now.
The Onsherpa | Reach peak Onshape productivity
www.theonsherpa.com
@Derek_Van_Allen_BD
Ruled surface generates some really crappy surfaces. A long time ago (2021) I did a series of tests trying to draft an elliptical face. I did extrude with draft, ruled surface, loft, and sweep. Even though an ellipse can be represented with 4 single span simple degree-3 rational NURBs, every way I tried to do this, it generated varying degrees of ridiculous multispan degree 3 curves.
Even now with boundary surface, I can't build a simple degree-3 rational surface - it turns it into a multispan non-rational degree-3.
Parasolid does some smart things with cylindrical surfaces, but it's quick to turn them into multispan non-rational degree-3 which isn't recognized as a cylinder or arc.
Simon Gatrall | Product Development Specialist | Open For Work