Hey folks! Alright so I am using Shapr3D for something that doesn’t seem like something people are generally using it for. Namely I am using it for laser cutting. I made laser cut buildings and terrain for hobbyist doing miniature war gaming. Yes, I can share some photos later on.
Shapr3D has really helped with designing stuff. In just a few hours I have knocked out some designs that have been a challenge everywhere I have been trying it. Now I did end up getting an iPad Pro upgrading from my iPad 10 (last years model) because doing some of the unique designs ate up memory or something and Shapr3D would crash.
Now onto my questions. If I have a design like for example bricks for a wall. Is there a way to extrude those while maintaining their own spacing and not being extruded as a giant union? In the screen shots below you will see the doorway arch. I have the stone “stacked” but if I extrude it all together it will be a single object.
Second question and I might have the answer. Is there a ways to group different parts of the sketch together. Again referring to the images below, you can see there is a rectangle (it will be a door) and there is a decorative piece above it. With that decorative piece and even the doorway is there is way to link it to the overall piece I was working on so if I click on it to arrange it they stick with it? I think the answer will be to make it a different sketch plane and then it would be grouped together.
I think that is the two pressing questions I have. A third is actually more a feature request. Being able to give sketch lines different colors though I don’t think DFX exports with colors, but SVG does. Anyways that is just to save me from moving it to the cutting software and having to change colors.
Thanks folks!
PS I did add some of the other stuff I have laser cut and even 3D printed that I did in Shapr3D
If you want the bricks to extrude as individual blocks, you’ll need to have narrow faces (could be a single face) between the bricks that get extruded to a lesser degree.
What you can do with the brick wall is to select every second (or non-connecting) cross-sections and extrude them at once. Then extrude the remaining to get separate bodies which can be chamfered of filleted to make them real.
You may have seen, we have a similar option you are missing when extruding from the faces of existing bodies. There is a little icon where you can select if the extrusion should be a new body, a unioned body, etc.
For grouping objects, the workaround now is to place them into folders. By tapping on the folder’s name you can select every element placed in the folder, and interact with them. Is that what you were missing?
Thank you Peter. Alright, that little option you have circled is the copy option isn’t it? I will have to toy with that as I haven’t paid it attention till you said something. I guess I was assuming it was the copy action.
As to the grouping I am talking about the sketches themselves. If I have a front wall and a rear wall with cutouts in it, they are all in the same plane. Which in and of itself is fine. What I am looking to be able to do though is if I have a wall with windows, doors, or other things that might not be directly connected with the overall shape and this is on the sketch plane itself, that I can group those things together. But they would still be separate from another wall that might have the same things just organized better.
It’s not a huge deal I have just encountered a few situations where it would be useful for the sketches themselves to be “grouped” so I could move them quickly.
For bodies I have been doing just fine with putting them into folders. Actually in the above images those roof tiles are all in a folder to make selecting them nice and easy.
Just after you extrude something from an existing body’s surface it will pop up to let you decide what to do. If you extrude into the body, the default will be the subtraction, if you extrude from the body, the union will be the default but you can change it anytime.
I totally see the point in sketch grouping and the color of the sketches. I will not promise anything boldly, but I will note it, appreciate your feedback.
