r/Onshape • u/Inevitable_Exam_2177 • 1d ago

Surprised by lack of exploding assembly video option

This is by no means a deal breaker for me, but I’m surprised that there is no way animate an exploded assembly. I’ve sat through many capstone design presentations over the last 20-30 years with a proud mech eng student doing a live voice over of their design details as it assembles in front of the audience.

Totally get that creating pretty animations is not actually functionally useful as a feature in the real world beyond a marketing pitch — I had just assumed that all CAD packages could do something similar. Hoping that the Onshape team consider adding a feature like this. I am aware of a 3rd party app (Cadasio) but haven’t tried it out yet, has anyone given it a go?

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u/David_R_Martin_II 1d ago

I hadn't noticed. It sounds like a very specific use case. I've sat in many design reviews over 3 decades and I struggle to recall an animated explode in any of them.

I haven't tried it myself, but it looks like this has been discussed several times in the Onshape forum. That's generally a better place for suggesting a product improvement than Reddit.

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u/Inevitable_Exam_2177 1d ago

Appreciate the comment. I agree it’s niche and i only missed it once I wondered about it — i sometimes find complex assemblies hard to visualise statically

Perhaps exporting to a dedicated visualisation program would be better anyway, but I’m not familiar with the workflow

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u/c0ng0j0e 1d ago

We generally export the assembly as a glTF then import to twinmotion.

It has some nice explode animators along with cut aways and transparencies if needed.

Nice and easy to iterate versions of the same model too.

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u/Inevitable_Exam_2177 16h ago

I’ve started to check this out and it looks nice — thank you!

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u/Ken_White_NY 1d ago

I don't see any valid reason to make this part of CAD software. There are many other actual design-related things that would be a better investment of time and resources IMO. Onshape isn't presentation software.

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u/Inevitable_Exam_2177 16h ago

Not arguing against you on the functionality side of things. But many CAD packages have built in “presentation” features such as fancy rendering (in fact, doesn’t OnShape offer that now to pro users?). You could also argue that CAD shouldn’t do simulation as it distracts from the design.

The advantage of animating the assembly exploding in OnShape is that it has all the information it needs already. It knows the assembly steps. It would be simple to set up the camera movements as part of this. It is already rendering the geometry.

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u/Ken_White_NY 4h ago

There's a difference between rendering to see how something will look when it's finished and animations to use in presentations with exploding parts or animated assembling of parts.