How to automatically export a list of step files?

The rendered image looks great, I want that look on my website. I think the cadillac solution here would be to link a gltf and stick it into a webgl rendering engine on your client's website. This way a customer could spin the model around and interact with it. 

Export is a dirty word and should be avoided. Creating a bunch of files is bad and hard to manage. Onshape's version control is a great way to manage what's appearing on a companies website. You should link your client's website to onshape and avoid all those files.

This isn't a plug-in or something simple to do yet. It's the future and it's coming.

I'm trying to expose onshape models on the web. The idea that an engineer can create a family of products through configurations and exposing them on a company website is very interesting to me. I'm not sure where this is going, but I think its promising.

https://rustyshed.com/?quill=5fed5590dd784a11e1364a0e


Onshape does have to serve up the image, which isn't bad if the document is active. It is much slower if the document hasn't been accessed for awhile and gets moved to the "S" archive drive. You could create a script that touches each document and keep it active. They also cache the images, if an image of a configuration has been generated previously, it's served up quickly.

@bill_schnoebelen you are right about serving up gtlf, it's not documented. You can snoop onshape and see the commands it sends to the server, then just duplicate those from your own server. The API documentation isn't growing quickly, but there are no secrets, you just have to scrap the commands the client is sending to the server. That's your updated API documentation.


As far as speed, you can ask for a coarse model 1st, render it, and ask for a medium model, then render it. You can make it progressive. You can also save it to local storage so the next time it's fast. There's a lot of things that can be done. The model above in coarse mode was served up in seconds. I think progressive load can keep a web user entertained while the data is loading.

What really bugs me are the images. I keep trying to rotate the model. I read the named views from the document and display them on the web page, but it's a pain to change views by clicking a select box on a web page.

Also, why can't the drawing update? This bugs me too.

With gtlf you get the geometry, color mapping and it's native to webgl. I'm refraining from three.js and working directly inside webgl to build a rendering engine for onshape. I want it to behave like onshape, and look like onshape. But, I want an option to render based on the materials defined in the model. Brass will be brass, aluminum will be aluminum and candy apple red will look like a flame speeding down the road.

It's a lot of work and currently I don't have the time. Hopefully in the future I'll free up some time and build it. I haven't seen this type of integration yet but hope it gets here soon.


sebastian_glanzner my goal is to create an image equivalent to your rendered image without any model setup or additional image setup work; one that'll spin on a webpage. I like the pretty pictures, but I'm not willing to speed the time to create them. I also have a version pattern inside onshape that allows me link workspaces to my website. I can edit a model and merge it into the workspace which automatically updates my website. I found trying to update the website after changing the model was painful. With this version pattern, I can control a dynamic working environment and not crash my site. Well, not that often anyway.

Thanks for the kind website words. It's more of a playground than a website.

I'm not sure Onshape will ever venture into a rendering engine for websites, they need to focus on cloud cad. harmanpa has written the best web rendering implementation so far and it's pretty slick. 

I download everything from the web these days and stay away from suppliers that don't have 3D geometry available for my use. It's expensive for a company to create a website offering up CAD data. With onshape acting as the backend server, a company could build a warehouse of their components simply. If done right, components would have pricing and availability integrated which could update real time as long as you're in the onshape ecosystem. Desktop folks will always be downloading, converting out of date data, they live in a dark world.

It's going to get better, I'm pushing it forward millimeters each day.