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Update Create Selection to make it a more useful, intuitive, productive, and powerful tool

neobobkrauseneobobkrause Member Posts: 105 EDU
edited April 2020 in Product Feedback
OnShape's Create Selection tool is a real timesaver, though it's somewhat limited in its capabilities. I find myself needing to "dereference" a selection further. For example, I might have a face bounded by a long series of short curves, and I want to select the endpoints of these curves to construct a spline perimeter. I have many, many other examples like this that I could (literally) save hours of design time with the help of a more complete Create Selection tool instead of having to manually make these selections - a tedious, "monkey work" loss of productivity.

Here are some examples, though by no means an exhaustive list of dereferencing capabilities that I and other OnShape users would use if available to help us become more productive.

* Ability to populate the tool's selection parameter with the items already selected. Doing so will allow the selection to be expanded to those related to the currently selected items.

* Having selected a set of faces, change the selection to be the set of face edges. When using this capability, the user should be able to indicate whether edges shared by spatially related faces should be inclusive or unique.

* Having selected a set of edges, change the selection to be the set of vertices that are the endpoints (or midpoints) of those edges. When using this capability, the user should be able to indicate whether endpoints shared by spatially related edges should be inclusive or unique.

* Having selected a set of points, change the selection to be the set of related edges, faces, surfaces, and/or solids.

* Having selected a set of edges, change the selection to be the set of related points, faces, surfaces, and/or solids.

* Ability to select related items based on their relative lengths, angles or sizes within a given percentage or quantum. For example, edges of a similar (though perhaps not exact) length, or having similar curvature. Faces having similar areas, or solids having similar volumes.

* Ability to distinguish between a curve and a line, a face or a surface, etc.

* Ability to signify that Creat Selection should only try to match entities in the current context. For example, only things in the currently open sketch.

An upgrade of the Create Selection tool along these lines would be relatively easy to accomplish and provide a large productivity benefit to intermediate to expert users.

- Bob

Comments

  • wolfgangbuescherwolfgangbuescher Member Posts: 7 EDU
    a "save selection" or "Named selection" feature would be nice too, so you can re-use the selection made. Could be a feature in the feature list or a menu like "named views" is.
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