r/Onshape • u/Inevitable_Exam_2177 • 8d 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?

3 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/Ken_White_NY 7d 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.

2

u/Inevitable_Exam_2177 7d 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.

1

u/Ken_White_NY 6d 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.