Array feature

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Beaded Plate
Beaded Plate741×462 103 KB
One of the things I create for my employer are plate designs, often with decorative beaded edges. Shapr3D is an awesome app and far more accessible than most other 3d and CAD apps but it seems to be missing any kind of array feature.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to place a single decorative bead into my plate design and duplicate it multiple times (or create instances preferably) around a central axis. I can certainly do this manually but when a single plate often requires over a hundred decorative beads, the manual approach becomes unwieldy at times.

So, if possible I’d love to see both a radial and linear array function built into the app which would greatly increase its functionality for the kind of work I do.

Thanks,
Pierre

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Hi Pierre, makes sense and this comes among the top features we are working hard to incorporate into the app.
There is no set deployment date yet and I will pass on your feedback!

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I would agree with the feature request and look forward to further development. My design work relies heavily on linear and radial arrays. It’s the first function I looked for when starting the app. Glad to hear it’s on the roadmap. Otherwise, amazing app!

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God please push this feature through please!! ive been trying to get my work to start using this software over fusion 360, but this is the single reason they object to. signed up to the forum just for this feature request!

love the software and workflow, but no a ‘repeat copy by n’ is such a deal breaker. so many times, particulary when ribbing a whole cyclinder surface, i have to translate by axis once, then select two, translate by axis, select copy icon, then work this process in multiples till im all the way round (so 1,2,4,8,16, so on). takes at least five minutes to do this and tweaking the distances isnt possible.

any help would be really appreciated, i can see this thread and possible feature priority was over a year ago, could you let me know when you plan to add it or a beta version i can get to?

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As with others, this is the feature that is holding me back from purchasing. I use this feature all the time in 2D and 3D designs and in both linear and circular fashions. I can’t see moving on this software until this feature is added. Otherwise I love the app and the ease of most tools and features. The drag and drop import for IGES will be very useful from McMaster Carr or other sites as I use a lot of files from these places now. Let me know when you add the array feature and you have another sale.

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Yep, just installed the app today and needed the array function… still no sign of it, I see, after all this time. Not good.

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Very excited about this. Is there any update?

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years passing…
any news about array function?

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Yes, the team is working on it, and it will be released in quarter.

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It’s pretty insane to me that people have been waiting and asking for this feature for 2 years now and it is still not available. Especially something as important as the array feature.

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Hi @AustenSimmons , you are right, arrays are indeed very important. We receive hundreds, sometimes thousands of feature requests every month from our hundreds of thousands of users, and we are delivering these features as quickly as possible. With our bi-weekly updates we are catching up rapidly.

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Sorry, the quarter of which year?

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Sorry, the Pattern tool is not what I and many others are describing when asking for such a feature.

The Pattern tool in Shapr3D is a convenient way to duplicate a shape into many independent copies at once. Each subsequent copy generated is a distinct object completely unrelated to others.

What I and many others are asking for (in fact I can see from the Search function that your customers have been begging you to provide it for years) is a true Array modifier, i.e. a tool that duplicates several instances of a base object, so that when we edit this base object later on, all other occurrences of that object are also modified accordingly.

Alternately, this could also be a 2-step creation process, involving the concept of groups (that do not exist either in Shapr3D!) with first the creation of a “component” (like in SketchUp) then its copy/duplication X times. In such a way that, say, the rotation of one of the duplicated components in the world view does not affect (does not rotate) any of its other occurrences whatsoever; but the rotation of a component, after having entered this component grouped view, rotates all other linked instances exactly the same way at the same time. In a fell sweep.

This basic feature exists in all CAD softwares on the market, including free ones like Blender. Whether it is called “array”, “symbols”, “components”, “instances”, “occurrences”… they are the same concept. What is puzzling is this is available everywhere else except in Shapr3D.

What your are asking your customers you charge a lot for instead is to duplicate a shape for example 100 times (with the Copy tool, or more conveniently as you said, with the Pattern tool) and when the design has to be changed later on, instead of modifying the details of the base object once, we have to edit that object first, then repeat the exact same manual modifications again… 100 times in a row! This is insane, I couldn’t believe the feature didn’t exist in the first place. It is absolutely out of the question for us to have to proceed in such an absurdly inefficient way, even for something as simple as a chamfer.

So the important question is: are you currently working on the development of such a true component array feature, and what is the current ETA?

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This would require a history based modeling environment. Shapr3D is a direct modeling tool at the moment. I can’t share specific details of our roadmap, but we might have a surprise for you later this year.

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