Custom Feature: Amalgam Tag and Amalgamate

Lots of people to update after having been gone a week and taking a week to adjust to life back in the states but let's see if I can't get through all of you in one post:

@jason_ryan337 it appears to me that those dots are all just sketch points in the final studio, so hiding parts will never hide them. It's not really an amalgamate artifact so much as a general document thing. Shift + P will hide all the non-part things and make it easier to navigate around without the clutter of sketches in your vision.

As for mesh geometry, I haven't yet baked it into Amalgamate yet for a few reasons. I've found that the performance of mesh based parts is usually worse than analytical surfaces and solids for the same thing when it comes to downstream operations, and I have also ran into mesh objects becoming non-manifold on export to Bambu Slicer when many mesh bodies are involved in the creation of a part. It's an easy thing to add, but I didn't want people to start blaming this feature for more general issues with mesh geometry in Onshape right now.

@johannes_dörig and @EvanReese the one-tag-per-studio requirement is somewhat of a necessary architectural choice because I'm targeting the entire part studio for the derive input to make the end use of the tools as simple and consistent as possible. The standard derive input allows you to pick and choose which things you want to bring in out of a given part studio but if you imagine a list of 100 part bodies flooding the feature and selecting the needle in the haystack - and then imagine doing that 100 times without error across a department of users, you're basically guaranteeing some percentage of rework on your parts due to misclick. We ran into this precise issue with our prior usage of Point Derive, so the inputs are deliberately simplified.

The configuration / suppression solution is what we use when we have two different parts defined in the same tag studio, for example male / female variants of our 3d printed connector ecosystem. Male config just tags one set of bodies and female config tags another set. Actually you can do this by configuring the inputs instead of the suppression state, but either way works.

It was 50/50 work and play but I loved every minute of it. Already looking for ways to go back and visit for longer next time with a more relaxed itinerary.

As for why the tag feature strips the attributes from prior runs of Amalgam Tag, it's to make the logic simpler for chains of Amalgamate operations where you might be working with a shared library with 10 other users and they all haven't been the most consistent about which parts are included as insertion operations or additive operations or subtractive operations or whatever, and maybe you're creating a second, third, or fourth order Amalgam tool that is acting really strange with which parts are being ran for which operations at the end of the line. Clearing all Amalgam attributes and reapplying every time saves you the headache in tracking down where the inconsistencies are. The second example I tested involved some boolean or split operation that shuffled around where the attributes are landing on the final parts so you'll likely run into the same scenario if you make your own tag feature.

@EvanReese bought a bag of tasty licorice chalk at one of the train stations. Mostly I've been re-addicted to Tony's Chocolonely after forgetting about it for like a decade.

Yeah the attributes were getting merged or applied to different bodies than the final intended tools would have needed based on split priority or boolean order. Many times, the workflow for creating an amalgam tool involves copying a seed part and performing move face operations for clearances. If the original body has attributes, the copy will inherit them, resulting in a cutting tool also inheriting the add or insert attributes. There were also cases where the final amalgamate in the chain intentionally scopes a smaller subset of parts to operate on for performance reasons than including all of the other parts that may exist in the studio from prior amalgams, and delete part didn't seem like the cleanest way to achieve that.