So while I was looking at the SW weldment post it struck me that Onshape may treat parts similarly to how SW treats weldments.
In “Part Studio” you can create a bunch of “Bodies” and then essentially treat them as separate parts. SW weldments does essentially the same thing.
With my limited usage it would seem Onshape is significantly more versatile in it’s approach, IE being able to insert a single body of a part studio part into an assembly and probably a bunch of other things I haven’t discovered, but is the concept similar?
How easy is it to “Explode”? So what I was thinking that it would be relatively easy to design the “Basics” of something in a single file. So let’s say you were designing a “Boltment”. You drop all the bars and blocks etc into a single part. Pop in all the holes. Then you explode it into separate parts, create an assy and drop in all the fasteners.
Now maybe it’s better to leave it all in one part. Maybe I’m just not familiar enough with how to do BOM’s, how a person would get a model of single file for something like a CAM program etc.
There doesn’t appear to be an option to “explode” or save out the parts to an assembly. You can insert the individual bodies into a new assembly quite easily though so maybe not an issue. Being this is the cloud and there are no files, I guess you could view the bodies as files, they are just contained underneath the part studio object.
The part studio is mostly geared around design parts from scratch together. Inserting bars and blocks like you mentioned can be done via a derived part insertion but moving them around is harder than SolidWorks. There is no mate functionality in the part studio, just transform options like translate and rotate.
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I’m just playing with it at the moment but it seems to me that having a single part with a bunch of different part numbers in it might at some point in some system down the line cause problems over the traditional one part one file approach.
If you could design in a single part studio and then explode into multiple single parts that would be ideal. Again unless there is some other advantage I’m not yet seeing.
This is what I do with all (well almost all) my projects now. You have simplified it a little, but the idea is still the same. There are some specific steps that are required if you want a good drawing out of it (like being able to get Hole Wizard data from the original multi body part come through into the drawing).
I think you could view it as an in-context part if you want. Again…there are no files in Onshape so a body can be its own thing or not. Unless you are wanting to break the relationships to the studio part. Not sure that’s possible short of copying it and stripping out the stuff you don’t want.
Is there a free version of Onshape?
I mean, it is a hobby for myself, teaching my children, dealing with my home, making simple drawings, but definitely not for commercial use!
Is there a version that seems to have limited features? not limited time.
Hi kawuser
The thing that confuses me is that it says free in the title, but when you fill in the form to become a member, it says “Your trial version request has been received”.
Is the trial version limited time or feature restricted but time unlimited? I could not understand.
It’s definitely unlimited time at this point. I have had an account for over a year and haven’t paid them anything. I suppose at some point in the future Onshape could change their terms of service and cut off the free “version”, but it’s been free to use for a number of years now.
“Trial Version” in Onshape is essentially a free version of the full version where all your models are “Public”, at least that is my understanding. Accepting that my understanding here is limited at best, Onshape is a cloud based “Collaborative” based software. This allows you to share models with various people, groups etc. For the “Free trial version” the only option is to share your models with everyone else that has Onshape. Again my understanding, if you pay for it, you have the same features but you have complete control over model availability and sharing.
there is something wrong here and probably the free version is no longer available.
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The link I applied for https://www.onshape.com/en/products/free
I couldn’t understand how it happened, but now I’m back on the free version.
I probably made a mistake somewhere that I didn’t realize. everything is okay right now. Thank you again to everyone.
The free version has all the capabilities of the other versions as far as modeling and assemblies and drawings is concerned. You are limited to something like five documents that you can keep private. After that your documents must be “public” in that anybody else can find them and copy them. I have found other limitations of the free version, such as free add-ins are not allowed and a few other minor things, but for learning it is a great way to go.
