“This has been one of the most highly anticipated enhancements requested by our customers,” said Scott Harris, Onshape’s VP of product definition and user experience. “We’re proud to be delivering new tools that you can’t find anywhere else in the CAD industry. Our team has completely rethought and re-engineered the way sheet metal parts are designed and prepared for manufacturing.”
Unlike traditional desktop-installed CAD systems where users work in one mode (flat, folded or tabular) at a time, Onshape shows all representations in one simultaneous view. When designers edit one view, the other two are synchronised automatically using Onshape’s full-cloud database architecture. Seeing the flat and folded views side-by-side allows designers to visualise errors and interferences immediately, consider alternatives and ultimately, reduce scrap and wasted time.
Manufacturers can quickly change the parameters of a model in a bend table view – such as the radius or order of individual bends – while preserving the original design intent and seeing the impact immediately on the flat and folded views.
“This is going to prevent a lot of headaches between designers and manufacturers, because almost all sheet metal work is done collaboratively,” added Harris. “We created the system to allow designers to build in design intent and allow fabricators to adjust the model based on specific tooling, without violating the design intent.”
