From Constraint Manager to Width Mate: 8 Onshape Updates You Should Know About

I want to start with the constraint manager, and the reason I think this is so important is it's because it's something that we do all day long. So if you do a lot of parametric CAD, you inevitably are faced with a situation where your sketch looks like this. Right? And you have red errors everywhere and maybe add a dimension or constraint and suddenly everything blew up, and you don't know how to fix it. And so oftentimes, what we did in the past is you would manually hunt through and figure out what was the last constraint I added, what's it conflicting with, let's delete this, try that, and so on. But there was never a way to just look through the entire list of constraints and pick them out or to filter them by a specific subset or category.

That's what the constraint manager really gives you. And so I can't recommend this tool enough. This is something I think will impact all Onshape users out there, and it's something I think they'll really appreciate.

In the sketch dialogue, you'll have a little, button that says sketch diagnostics.

And in that, you'll see the new constraint manager. That's how you launch the constraint manager. You'll see the dialogue pop up here. And what's really neat about this is, of course, you can do things like filter.

That's really the in my opinion, the one of the biggest applications for this is I just wanna know show me all the coincident constraints. Right? I can do that. I can select coincident, and here are all the coincident constraints in this sketch.

But what's really nice is you could do multiple layers of filters. So let's say, show me all the constraints the coincident constraints that have an error. Now I have that one. Right?

So I can see that constraint.

Or I can filter by other things. Show me all of the external constraints. Of course, external constraints are, geometry that's constrained to something outside of that sketch. But now you have a quick way to filter that and say, show me the constraints that are just external or internal.

One of my personal favorites is actually in context. If you ever do a lot of in context design, knowing which constraints are tied to a contextual relationship rather than just the sketch is a really contextual relationship rather than just the sketch is a really useful tool. And the ability to just filter by that quickly, I think, is something that a lot of users will really appreciate. But, again, the things I would stress is just the ability to filter through and find all of the, you know, aired constraints that you may have or all the coincident constraints you may have or the external constraints you may have.

And, you know, I think one of the common applications for this is I have a sketch. Everything is aired out. I don't know why. Maybe I just wanna purge all the the the over defined constraints and start fresh.

And it's easy for me to just select errors, delete all, and it purges all of those constraints that have an error. Now you can sort last thing I'll mention about this, you can sort by combinations of things like I mentioned before. You can sort by constraint, which is what we've been seeing here, but you can also sort by entity. And I think that's a really useful one because oftentimes, when you have a conflict, it's between two things, two lines or aligners or whatever the combination of of geometry may be.

And this gives you kind of insight on a entity level rather than a constraint level. And so if you're trying to troubleshoot specific lines or circles or arcs or whatever it may be, sorting by entity is is probably the more useful way to filter through that data. But, again, just to stress, this gives you that layout, that list of your constraints where you could go through and delete and and and, you know, move them around as you see fit. But the big thing is you now have a place to filter and show all of those constraints in a single location.

So that is the constraint manager. Again, you'll find it in the sketch diagnostics, option in the sketch dialogue.

Now a brief, aside, a brief tangent while I'm in the sketch diagnostics, This did not come in the last quarter, and I believe it was the end of last year. But the profile inspector is also in the sketch diagnostics. If you haven't used profile inspector, highly recommended. It's a great tool for finding small profiles or or small gaps in your sketches that could be causing problems.

So just a quick plug. If you haven't used Profile Inspector, it's about six months old now. We've had it for for some time now, but it is one of those areas that I think a lot of users will really appreciate. The ability to find the tiny lines or tiny gaps and quickly isolate them, fix them is something a lot of users requested.

And going back to the core CAD theme, you know, core CAD is profile inspecting. It's constraint managing. It's fixing core sketches, and that's really what we're focused on here. So the tools for the constraint manager, those are things that every user at some point will benefit from.

And it doesn't matter what kind of products you design. There's a strong chance constraint manager is gonna be part of your day to day workflows. And the same goes for Profile Inspector. Both of these I would define as kind of core CAD features that everyone's going to use and really benefit from.

So that is profile or excuse me, constraint manager with a quick plug for profile inspector. If you haven't used it yet, highly recommend checking that out.

The next thing I would like to highlight is the improvements around repair manager. Now repair manager isn't new. What we've really done is made an improvement that is so awesome that we really need to take a moment to highlight it here. And I really wanted to take a second, to not only show you repair manager and kind of the core of how it works, but why forward propagation is so important.

So here's an example. I have this pump that I've imported. This is an imported model, but I've built all of these reference features off of it. So if you ever worked with a model, you import it, you build all these kind of contextual relationships, you know, maybe, features downstream of that imported model, and then you get a new import. Right? And then you need to replace all those references.

And if you ever done this, you it's not uncommon to see a feature list that looks like this, where once that initial import has been changed, all of the references below it may break. Right? Now it's not a given, but in many situations, that is the case. It will break those references, and you have to go back through and replace them. And we've all dealt with situations where you make a change, and it causes a kind of domino effect of red errors. That's just the nature of parametric cat. But what we've done here is really change how you fix these problems.

And the reason I like this the reason I like to stress this is because we're using Onshape's architecture. You know, cloud based architecture that automatically tracks versions and history, we're using that to make the core cat experience of fixing errors better. And I think that's the message that I would send is, you know, fixing errors can be a tedious thing. It's not a fun task. It's something that people don't generally enjoy doing, and you just wanna get it done and get and move on and start building new things. That's what this helps you to do. It it allows you to make, you know, a quick fix on a model, push those changes for those references down to other features that may also be referencing that, and fix things much faster than you would otherwise.

Now I wanna take one step back. If you haven't used the repair manager, I highly recommend it. It's it's one of those tools that I think once you really start diving into it, you won't go away. You know, it's not a tool you'll use once. You'll use it and then realize it's awesome and use it in in every situation to fix a broken reference.

But if you haven't tried it, you just right click on a on a feature that's failing. You'll see a moment an edit healthy moment of that feature. And what this is doing is it's looking through our versions and history, and it's finding the last time that that feature successfully regenerated.

And then it's showing you that in the right hand side. And so you see there, as soon as I hit edit last healthy moment, a fly out pops out from the right, and it says this is the last moment where that feature was healthy, and this is the thing that it was selecting. And you can see it there. It's highlighting the face that I've chosen to define for this extrude feature. And the reason this is so important is I can see okay. You know, a month ago, when this was regenerating successfully, that face was the selected entity that drove this extrude feature. So I should replace that with this.

Now that has been around for for a few months now. Repair manager has been around for a few months now.

What's really awesome and what's really different with this release, the thing I would stress, is this little icon inside of here for replace references.

And so if you click this, it'll say, okay. Here's your missing reference. What do you want to replace it with? And so all I have to do is select the face I want to replace it with.

In this case, I'm just selecting the new face of the new imported model. But what's really critical here is this is not only replacing the reference in this feature, it's gonna go through the entire feature list and find any references to that face and replace those as well. And so really critical if you find yourself in a situation where you make a change high up in the feature list and suddenly there's this domino effect of errors that come from well, chances are replacing some of those references and pushing those or propagating those changes forward will fix things very quickly. And so here's an example where, you know, I have extrude two, sketch four, all of these three features are dependent on this one to exist.

And you may have a situation where you've built hundreds of features that are dependent on a single feature to exist. And if that happens, then you can see, you know, the domino effect and the amount of time spent fixing it is very laborious.

This allows you to say, take find this missing reference and replace it in any place in the feature list where it's used. And so now all I have to do is hit the green check, and now I've not only fixed extrude two, but I've also fixed sketch four and extrude four that were referencing that same face. And again, I could have twenty more, thirty more features on top of that that would have also been fixed and forward propagated to to fix that issue as well. So it's one of those things I think will make a big difference in day in, day out.

This is one of those things, again, core CAD, everyone experiences errors at some point. Regen errors are just a natural part of Parametric CAD going back through and fixing those references, an important part of Parametric CAD and something that we are now doing, I think, in ways that are better than than anyone else can because of our architecture, because we have the history and we can see every moment and then push those changes forward. And the thing I would say about repair manager is we shipped it as soon as it added value. Right?

We shipped it as soon as you have the repair panel and the the ability to cross highlight and fix things interactively because we saw that added value. But as soon as we had forward propagation, we added that too. And it's not done. You know, the this is one of those things that we're going to continue evolve because fixing, references is one of the most common tasks that users experience.

And if we could make that smoother, easier, it's important to us. And so it's one of those things I think is really noteworthy, and, I wanted to go to my out of my way to really highlight that. Not only highlight it, but highlight the fact that we're using our versions and history to make fixing errors better. And that's something that I think a lot of users will really appreciate.

This is one of the most highly requested sheet metal improvements, that we have. And so for all the audience out there that's doing sheet metal design, I think you're going to be the ones who really appreciate this one the most, and that is the ability to create a sheet metal cone. And so or conical sheet metal part. Right?

So if you're in this situation where you're creating rolled sheet metal parts, and we have the ability to do this with a cylinder some time ago, but cones have been a limitation until recently. And, again, you know, the example I'm showing you here is a concrete bucket constructed using sheet metal rolled sheet metal parts that are welded on along the seam, and this is an excellent example where you might use sheet metal cone. And there's not much to show here. It just works now, and I think that's the one of the things I love about Onshape is now when you select a conical surface, you get a flat pattern.

There's nothing special about it. It's not a separate feature. You're using the same sheet metal model feature that you've always used. So if you create sheet metal parts, you know the sheet metal model.

You have convert. You have extrude. You have thicken. You have the various ways of creating sheet metal parts.

Now when you select a conical face, it just works, and it gives you that ability to define a cone shaped sheet metal part and see the flat panel and the unrolled version of that sheet metal part so you can take it and roll it and and have accurate values. But, again, the thing I would stress about this highly requested. A lot of users have have, asked us for this, and it's one of the things that was a top priority for us. Now the last thing I want to mention about this is you see me using convert to do it, and that works great.

You can also use thicken. In this situation, the example I'm showing you here, both will work equally well and both give you kind of the same end result. And so the thing I would say about this is, you know, the ability to create cone sheet metal parts is just like the repair manager, the next step for us. And one of the areas where we really hope, you know, you'll see that improvement, incremental improvement that Greg was just talking about as time rolls on.

You know, the the drumbeat of releases is never going to stop for us, and and that's some one of the areas that I think people really appreciate.

So that is sheet metal cone and conical sheet metal parts, something, I know a lot of users will get really excited about.

Now as I mentioned before, if you were to take a list of all the improvements that happened over the last quarter, drawings is definitely high on that list because just the sheer volume of drawing improvements, coming with each release is big. And we don't always highlight them because they're not, you know, always relevant to everyone, and sometimes they're smaller and bigger improvements. But some of these are quality of life improvements I think, users will really appreciate. And they're subtle things, but if you do a lot of drawing creation, it's there are things I think you'll appreciate.

So the example I wanna show you here is just creating a drawing using center linear pattern geometry. In this case, this is a centered linear pattern. Here, I have a linear pattern of holes that are centered around that circular hole there, and I just wanna create a drawing. Right?

So let's create a drawing, and we'll just choose a default template. And what I wanna do is insert a view. There's nothing really different about this until that view gets inserted. So I'm going to go ahead and select that linear center pattern part, and I'm going to drop this into my drawing.

What I really want to stress here as I zoom in is notice all of the center marks that are automatically added. Now in this case, I only have five pattern holes. But you can imagine if you had thirty pattern holes in your geometry, the process of manually creating center marks is just a tedious one in the drawing, and you just don't have to do that anymore. Automatically, when you insert a drawing view, you have those center marks available for you, and you don't have to do any manual steps to accomplish that.

And I think that's something that, you know, small quality of life improvement, but one that many users will appreciate. Because, again, if you did a lot of linear patterns, it could be a tedious task to go through and define center marks for each of them.

So here we've got a seat rail, and we're just gonna put some kind of slot tab into it.

So I've got my first with mate already done, and that is you can see here, I've got two tab mate connectors. These are the faces, here that are in orange. And then the width mate are the, down here on the, in the, in the on the other part here, which is a separate part, and this is now aligning this perfectly, symmetrically, or in centered, through through there. Now what it hasn't done yet is fully constrain it. It allows it to move, ten in in two translations that way as well as a rotation this way. So in order to fully, say, fix this down, or allow, you know, the degrees of freedom that I want, I'm actually going to apply a planer mate here. And you can see here, I've put a planer mate with a little offset.

If I come in closely, you can see I've got an an offset there. Now this just leaves one degree of freedom, which is sliding up and down there, which I might want to leave or I could apply, you know, additional, say, a tangent mate between these two faces or a planer mate between these two faces. You can use sort of these additional alignment type mates, to really lock it down in in into the place you want. This is a really simple one and the the benefit of this and the beauty of it is that, you know, these faces here which are the width mate don't have to be parallel, and they don't have to stay the same, right, they can change and the the width mate will will accommodate that. You know, this is sort of the reality of trying to put things into, these kind of slot mechanisms.

Right.

Another example of this, in fact, this is a really simplified looking example, and it's on purpose because it's it can be kind of as a complicated thing, you know, so we'll just use something simple here. And this actually came at us through through the forum. Somebody was asking on the forum on the what's new, we have a, you know, a nice area where we discuss the things that are, you know, what's new in in basically, in real time. Right? So the problem is is that this is a TV screen or some a nice poster of your favorite, software, and you wanna put this on your wall, and you want to align it so that it's exactly centered between the roof, rail here and the floor. And we're gonna put it some some offset off the wall.

So first, I'm gonna use a width mate, and you can see here again I've just used the width mate with these two faces forming where the mate connector for the tabs are going to be, and then I'm just going to use the, the width the the the width mate from the so this rail here to the bottom of the floor there. Now as before this still allows us some degree of freedom to on the plane, now this plane is the midplane between these two, width mate references And it can also rotate, around that plane. So we're not maybe we're not done yet. Maybe we want to add an additional planer mate, to the back of the wall, and I've used an offset here, sort of ten inches or something off off the back of the wall.

And we're nearly done. Just as before, there is still one degree of freedom left, that is this translation in the, the local x direction. So, you know, if we wanted to really align it up with this edge here, we could add an additional planar made or, again, tangent made. These things, you know, add up quite nicely.

And there's another example I know that Mike Lafleche put in, the forum on the on the the thread in in the forum, about doing this for sort of, like, a a cylindrical shaft rotating, between two pillar blocks or something like that. The third example oh, actually, no. On this example here, to make it a little bit more interesting and show you a little level of complexity, I'm gonna take out the perspective view so that you can see it directly side on.

I've made this roof rail not perpendicular or sorry, not parallel to the floor. And in fact, you'll see as I rotate it, the bisecting angle is how we align, the width mate. Alright. You can see here the TV is is main maintaining sort of that bisecting angle.

In fact, I can also move this, up and down. You see here it's perfectly remaining exactly between, the top of the rail and the, and the floor.

So you can have some fun with this thing. It's a it's a powerful assembly mate, and it's going to do, make make life a lot easier especially when you get to some things like this assembly here, which is a nice scanning tool and it's got a kind of a a GoPro style mount.

This is a it's a really good example for, you know, you wanna center this adjustment screw.

You wanna center the threaded portion here, and there's there's a little bit of a gap.

You also want to center this tab into exactly a good use of of a width mate. You want to center this tab in between the slot here and then perhaps you want to provide one or two more planar or tangency mates, to set this in. So you can see here a very small number of seven mates really took care of this whole, whole assembly for me, and it made it made it very, very convenient.

So that's the width mate.

Here we are. I can make certain things transparent just by using the shortcut key, if you're at shift t. Alright? And you can see here that the new transparent mode allows you to see some of the internal faces, even though those they will become transparent. Now to compare to the old way of looking things or, you know, the other way of looking things, this is what it used to look like. Right? You'd see the outside face, but you wouldn't see any of the internal details.

So if you want to, you can just slide this across to give you the desired level. And depending on the model, you know, that that level is is going to be, you know, to your taste, and it's worth, it's worth doing that.

So the other thing then you might want to do is, something like this. Okay. Let's build a section this time.

Let's cut a section, and we're okay there. Now we're going to say use an isolate on two different parts, and you can see here this is a really good example of seeing internal details even though they're in the transparent kind of form.

And now we're going to use the measure tool, and we can measure between even a transparent thing and something that's, something that's not transparent and something that's isolated isolated isolated. And here is the minimum distance between that transparent edge and the, the isolated edge there. So all of these tools really have come together, really really nicely and work, together in concert.

Yeah.

Like that.

Another example of this is when we've got this is a nice example because this is a mesh.

The top is a mesh and the bottom is not.

I can hide those edges. I use shortcuts for a lot of things, including hiding edges, and I can do a couple of things. I can either isolate the surface model, and you get a really, really cool look at what's going on inside this model, especially if we go back to the differential here.

You know, again, I've got the select transparency, sent select transparent geometry option turned on, so I can do things, you know, like measurements between edges or or, and just as as we did before.

You know, it's a small thing, but it's a huge quality of life improvement, and, you know, creating images for, you know, for for marketing purposes or for just explaining to your boss what you're doing, this is this is a really, really, really nice improvement.