How to view Onshape models with NO SIGNUP and NO INSTALL

Start 00:00

If someone's shared Onshape document with you via view only link, and you click it, you'll be greeted with a page that looks about like this. And this link is a really powerful way for people to evaluate design CAD for free without having to install anything at all. 

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So I'm going to, in this video cover how to do a number of things from basic navigation, to taking measurements, viewing section views, exploded views, evaluating a bill of materials, and even doing a Draft Analysis, all for free directly in your web browser. 

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Navigation 00:39

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First things first, here's how you can navigate around the Workspace. These buttons down at the bottom will help you move around, click rotate. To rotate the Part. Click pan [phonetic 00:54], in order to pan apart, the icons are pretty self explanatory. In order to zoom in and out, you have a couple of options, click the drop down, click zoom to zoom in out. I'm clicking and dragging. You could zoom a window, if you want to examine something closely or you can zoom to fit and it will fit the entire part on the screen. Zoom to fit is also helpful if you somehow get totally lost and you can't find your part. If you just click zoom to fit, you'll bring it back. 

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If viewing models like this is something that you expect to do often, you'll probably want to learn how to interact with the model using your mouse. So clicking on this middle button or the scroll wheel allows you to pan, rolling the scroll wheel is your zoom and right click allows you to orbit the part. Moving from left to right on this bar. 

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Section views 01:48

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We have a section view here. So in order to do that, simply click and grab any planar face for [phonetic 01:54] a cylindrical face. And here you can see that we are scrubbing through. So you can go in for example and see how these screws look on the inside. And yes, that looks like it will work. To exit the view, you can push the red X or just click that button. 

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Bill of Materials 02:16

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The next button here is the Bill of Materials. And if the designer has filled out their metadata properly, then you'll see that stuff here. You can-- the Bill of Materials is great. It's interactive between the model. So what I mean by that is I can click this here, which is the row representing the top enclosure and it will also select it in the window here and over on the side and it works backward as well. So if I grab over here, you'll see I've selected my part. And it's highlighted that in the bill of materials, and I can also grab it from the window. So any of these three places, it's all just different ways to interact with the same model. You can see we've also got our part quantities. So all of our screws, there's four of each, I can see part numbers. And if I wanted to see something that's not shown here, you can go add column and material for example. And so you can see that our top enclosure is PC/ABS and our hardware is Stainless Steel. 

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Exploded views  03:21

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Next button over, we have exploded views. And if the designer has created an exploded view, then you'll see it here. In order to view it just double click. And it's easy as that. So you can rotate around and still use all of your zooming. You can zoom in on this, for example, if you want to see that more closely. Bring it back through to fit and hit do

ne when you're done. 

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Measure 03:48

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The next button over let's just take measurements, if you grab this and grab a couple of items, whatever you're interested in, it will infer what the appropriate measurement is. So in this case, we needed to know the parallel distance. But if I deselect that face and grab this one, it knows we're looking for an angle because they're not parallel. So you can see that we have 93 degrees, which means we have 3 degrees of draft [phonetic 04:08]. You can even grab the center points of axes. So I have these two cylinders, and it will recognize them as cylinders and give me the distance between the center axes. So that's the distance between these holes, for example. 

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Mass properties 04:29

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You may also need to know things like volume and center of mass and weight and things like that. And that can be done here, mass properties. So click the button, grab a part. And you can see here's our mass, here's the volume, and the center of mass shows up in the display.

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Draft analysis  04:47

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One last analysis you may be interested in is a Draft Analysis to make sure that the part is moldable. And in order to do that, we actually have to leave this tab here which is the assembly and we need to go to this tab where the parts were created. 

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The best way to do that if there are multiple tabs, and you're not sure where the part came from is to right click the part in the window and click this button with this icon, switch to Speaker Enclosure. So that will take us over to this studio. And this is where the parts were actually created and can be edited. The assembly is just for putting parts together and simulating motion. So here, if we want to do a Draft Analysis, the first thing I might choose to do is right click this part and hit hide other parts so that we have a cleaner view of only the thing we're interested in. 

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And next, if you're already in the shaded view, click the gray cube and click Draft Analysis. So you'll get this dialog, the Mold split direction, you can pick a planar face or a line or an edge. So here I know that that face goes in the direction that I want. And this is the entity that I'm interested in. So right away, you can see, light blue is one side of your tool, dark blue is the draft the other way or the other side of the tool. Anything that is yellow is face that is below this threshold. So because most of the part has 3 degrees of draft, it's all blue. But the yellow faces here, if you mouse over, you can see that they have about one degree of draft. So if I change this to be 1 degree, you'll see that those are now compliant. And yes, you can see that they are drafted. So that's it. I hope that all of these tools can help you to evaluate parts that have been shared via view only link in Onshape.

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