Basic Shapr3D action on an iPad

Need help? We are here.
1

Hi,

I’m new to Shapr3D and have been using it on my brand new iPad with my pencil. I’m drawing things to print on my 3D printer. I’ve gone through the tutorials and am able to draw things reasonably well, but I’m having a lot of problems doing what I feel are basic tasks.

I extruded a body out and exported it to a new project and then opened that up. It seems to have just placed it randomly in the xyz plane (I had imported the original from a drawing I made in fusion 360 before switching over), So I feel like I just want to perform a very basic task:

I want to move this body to the origin. Real 0,0,0. I can select the body and choose move/translate, but I can never get to an absolute value for my coordinates. It always relative. I just want to move it to the origin and not guess how much I’d need to move it relatively from random(x,y,z) to (0,0,0).

Since I cannot enter absolute numbers anywhere, I looked around and found that the move/translate button lets me select the whole body and then choose two points. Of course the origin is not a point that I can choose (does this program hate the origin or love relativity?), so instead I have to draw a little line there.

Drawing on the origin or any of the x,y, or z lines using the pencil on the iPad is surprisingly very difficult. If you get near it or hold the pencil against the screen for more than a few milliseconds, it will not let you draw a line or anything. I have to basically windmill slam my pencil down and draw the line as fast as humanly possible to get a line to appear, and then of course because I need to draw super fast I mess it up. Anyways, I spent a good 10 mins trying to draw a little line so that I could create a 2nd point of reference on the origin in which to move my body.

So I selected my body and chose move/translate and chose a part of that line as one point and a part of my body as another (I can’t seem to select things exactly, so everything is a little off). I eventually figured out that despite the text telling me that I have to select two points to move, what I actually have to do is draw a line from one place to another and then that vector carries the directionality and lets me move my body to the line I drew earlier.

So now I’ve moved the body near the origin, but once again it is not exact and I have no way to enter absolute coordinates. Nothing snaps and I cannot find any menu mentioning snapping at all.

I just feel like this should be a really simple concept that people use all the time, and I’m just completely confounded by it. I can’t even begin my work because I can never get a body to start on the origin.

2

First, everyone who works with Shapr knows this and understands this limitation of Zeroing so we work around it.

Shapr wants you to create a sketch in correct manner meaning, place it where you need it dead center if you want. Extrude and build around it, in that case no need to zero anything. Remember this app is built around the iPad and the ui, feature limitation carries over to the desktop so reason why the UI looks clean and simple, not trying to do everything like FUSION.

The zeroing issue starts to occur when you import objects created outside of Shapr. Because location during export is carried over when you import, you could possibly zero it out before export, importing doesn’t reset to zero in Shapr maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think import placement is random.

Finally the pencil, you just need to give it some time and after some repetitive task it will become more natural and what you described is what I first went through too.

1 Like
3

I don’t know why you need this, I made a lot of projects and never need to place imported body to origin.

S3D indeed doesn’t have such a function, but you alway can draw a sketch near origin and use align tool to transfer object there.

Strange to hear that. I have no problems to draw a line or anything else along axis or origin point. Also you can always use constraints on a sketch to put its parts along any axis.

1 Like
4

Hey I super appreciate the quick responses on a weekend, I hope you all are having a good one.

I totally get that I’m coming at this from a different perspective and need to recalibrate for that. I just have a super simple ellipsoid that I didn’t want to bust out the calipers and remeasure, so I thought I could import it. I won’t do that again :).

I also appreciate the videos explaining things; I didn’t realize I could do that on the iPad to show you. I followed the steps laid out in the first video as best I could, but I’m not able to select the coincident button on (your) right hand side of the screen.

I made some videos showing my issues, including the drawing on the axes being extremely difficult, but I cannot upload yet.

But the issue I’m having now is that I’m able to project the 2D sketch onto the origin like you showed, but after trying to select the center point of the sketch I get the little window that says Normal to Sketch at the top, and then I select the origin point and it seems to draw a white line and show the measurement from those two points, but the coincident button does not alight. Constraints Settings is lit (but doesn’t seem to have any relevant options, auto-constrain is off, not sure how that affects things), but none of the other buttons below it are.

Again, I appreciate your help and certainly don’t expect a play by play to help or anything, I just wanted to respond with what I found.

I think maybe I just need to learn to never import anything and draw everything from scratch - time to bust out the calipers!

1 Like
5

You need to select circle center and origin point. Nothing else has to be selected in that time.

I import a lot of things to my projects, that’s totally ok. You just need to master using of align tool. :slight_smile:

There are a lot of videos on Shapr3D YouTube channel, including about align tool.

1 Like
6

Yeah, I kept looking for answers/videos regarding absolute coordinates, but that was approaching it from the wrong perspective. Continuing to point to the Align tool made me go watch a bunch of videos on that. I’m still not able to align it using the projected sketch, but I deleted that and just drew a new huge circle at the origin (note that drawing a circle on the origin is easy, I’m guessing the difficulty with drawing lines from the origin is that drawing on the colored axes is just not allowed or only allowed when drawing super fast).

I didn’t realize that I just needed any shape to be drawn on the origin that has a center on the origin to align to. Pulling way back out of all the menus and just opening the project again from scratch, I clicked on sketch and drew a giant circle with the origin at the center and then clicked on Align and followed what I’d learned. Drawing a vector between the center point on the face of my little ellipsoid and the center point of the circle moved the object pretty close, but it wasn’t aligned on all axes. I then went through the align process again and this time I could just click on the 2 bodies’ (except one is a sketch?) center points and they just aligned. Not sure how I did it differently, but I got there and exported it out to a new project so that I can start from scratch from there from now on.

My experience with CAD-like tools is only through my work (~25 years as an FPGA/ASIC designer with a focus on high speed signal integrity) where I mostly use mentor graphics tools to go over pcb layouts and such. I just need to learn to approach things a little differently.

Thanks again!

7

That’s not fully correct. Aligning depends on the form of the body and surface you’re aligning to, that’s why I showed you variant with projection, it give you full control of the process.

I read everything you did to align and have to say you overcomplicate the process.

You can share the model you trying to align and I will show how that can be done.

Align tool is very powerful and can be used very differently depends on the situation.

1 Like