Improve user experience and workflow: Stop automatically turning off Sketch

[donsmac]

I have a few ideas to improve the workflow and user experience, but I will submit them as separate ideas, one at a time.

Some one thought it was a good idea to have the sketch turn off, or become invisible automatically after you perform an operation like extrude for example. This must have been thought of as such a good idea that there was not even the option of not having the sketch turn off even when the user was not finished with sketch. 

Each model I have made contains many parts and most sketches are needed for more than one operation so when I do the first operation the sketch closes and I have to find it and turn it back on. After chasing the sketch a thousand times to turn back on it gets more and more annoying especailly when you have lots of parts and lots of sketches. An option is needed in the preferences to allow the user to choose to turn off automatic closing of the sketch. Something like:

 

It's easy enough to turn sketches off when you are done with them so there is no reason to add the extra step of chasing after it to turn it on each time. I have looked at sample files that are provided with Fusion and see that many sketches have more than one sketch element. 

What I suggest here should be easy to implement.

Please please please....

[roambotics_scott]

Yeah that pisses me off almost every single time it happens. Let the user worry about when they want to leave the sketch.

Stacking onion-skin layers on each sketch rather than creating new sketches all the time or jumping around in the timeline for no good reason would also be hugely useful.

[Anonymous]

Perhaps a checkbox in the palette when creating the feature to select / deselect 'hide inputs'.

Although, as far as I can tell, if you have a sketch you want to use for multiple features, you only need to make it visible after the initial feature, beyond that it will stay visible through multiple additional features.

I mostly appreciate the sketch getting hidden after the first feature because it allows me to more clearly evaluate the geometry that been created. Although I do appreciate how it could be useful sometimes to not have this happen immediately.

N

[roambotics_scott]

I don't think anyone is suggesting getting rid of that as an option. Just at least giving users the ability to have F360 not do it if we don't want it to.

[promm]

Thank you for your idea, this is getting changed to future consideration.  When work is started, it will be changed to accepted.  I do have a question for those of you who have responded to this idea.  Would an option in preferences or in sketch pallet be a better solution to your workflow.  Another way to ask it is, would you rather have this be more of a permanent switch or on a occasional situation.

Regards,

Mike Prom

[donsmac]

Hi Mike, I thank you considering this idea. 

The permanent solution would be fine for me. Adding a checkbox option in the preferences would seem to be simplest to implement and the best solution. 

I can appreciate trying to come up with an 'occasional' solution by including an option in the sketch pallet however that defeats the purpose and how would that work. scenario: you start a sketch and add sketch elements. You extrude an element. boom... your sketch disappears because you forgot to go find the check box in the sketch pallet and check it before you did the extrude.

The permanent solution (put option in preferences) avoids this extra step and annoyance at forgetting to go check the box each time, that's not. Plus it unnecessarily adds something to the sketch pallet (less is more...better). It's easy enough to turn the sketch on and off from the browser, people don't need an additional option in the sketch pallet to leave sketches turned on. Plus, you would have to look at the sketch pallet every time you work on a sketch to see if the button was checked or not so that the sketch will do what you want, disappear or not.

It's easy just to turn off the visibility of the sketch in the browser when you are actually done with it. A lot easier than going and finding it each time you do an operation on one sketch element...and the sketch auto-disappears. It's that accumulating annoyance of constantly having to search for the sketch each time to turn the thing back on everytime I'm am just starting to use the sketch, I do not want it to turn off. The permanent option is all you need to implement. Having the sketch turn off automatically is actually totally unnecessary... It's just there because someone thought it would be helpful and maybe it is because it saves you from turning off the sketch but I bet because of it, more time is spent going to the browser to turn the sketch back on, so any time saved is later wasted on having to take extra steps to turn it on. I see everyone in doing it. If people want to keep doing it like that, they don't ever have to know anything was changed if you simply add the checkbox option to the preferences.

Please don't add any thing to the sketch pallet. I would not want to see that. Leave that as a separate idea which can be implemented at some later date if someone suggests it and people vote on it. I don't think that would happen. I would not vote on it. 

Cheers

~Don

[promm]

@donsmac,

Thank you for the feedback.  My though behind having the option int pallet would be a similar experience to the sketch grid.  Once you turn it on or off, it will stay that way until you change it again.  The reason why I asked is in other CAD tool consuming the sketch also automatically turns off the sketch, so if I make it a preference I will be wrong %50 of the time.  If my assumption is true how does the user know to go to preferences to make the change?  I am hoping to hear as many opinions on this as I can and will make a decision based off of customer feedback.  Either way, you will not have to check it overtime.

Cheers,

Mike Prom