In the Windows version, I’ve never been able to snap to the axis of an existing hole. Once defined (set), the axis is visible if viewed obliquely but always disappears if viewed in the normal plane for sketching. Carefully hovering in the vicinity of the axis never yields any snapping behavior.
Being able to snap to an axis is often necessary, but it is either omitted in Shapr3D or is one of the many abstruse, non-intuitive things omitted from the dozens of tutorials I’ve watched. Does axis snapping exist? If so, what is the trick to using it?
Parenthetically, why can’t Shapr3D be smarter and more user friendly? For example, the program could realize that an axis was recently created and now the user is repeatedly hovering over it, clearly trying to snap to it. Why not just snap to it? From what I can tell, axes are visually apparent (viewed obliquely) but do nothing functionally. This is a CAD program, not art, so it should behave as such and be programmed to help users, not repeatedly exasperate them with needless annoyances that often waste hours of time per day.
You are absolutely right, the intersection of construction axis and sketch planes should likely work as snapping points and right now they don’t. We’ll look into that.
Until then, alternatively, if your hole is cylindrical and orthogonal to your sketch plane, you could use the Project tool to achieve a similar effect: you could either project the edge of the original hole into the plane where you want to do your sketch. After that you could snap to the axis of the hole by snapping to the center of the circle that appears. You could also start your sketch at an arbitrary point and then use the Translate tool to move it to the desired location – that also snaps to the hole’s centerpoint automatically.
We continuously work on making Shapr3D an even more smooth experience for professional users and this is one area that could indeed be made better.
I’ve used the projection method you mentioned as a workaround, which works fine, just takes extra steps, hence time.
Parenthetically, for those of us who code, could you open up your code base so users could contribute to it? This could accelerate product development. It would be (for example) really nifty to define certain mathematical functions and turn that into part of the CAD file. Some things easy to do with math/code are challenging with traditional CAD.
At the moment we don’t have plans to open source our product itself. However, we do have plans to introduce ways to interact with the design space in a programmatic way, but it’s not likely it will happen this year.
I can’t get snapping to work at all in MacOS. Not to a face, not to an edge, nothing. Makes it somewhat impossible to align 3D objects or sketch elements.
Something as simple as placing a circle at a location offset a specific mm from the bottom and left of rectangle that has a fillet applied.
It’s possible to use the align tool to position the center of a circle (or cylinder) to EITHER the left or bottom, but not both. Therefore impossible to get an accurate offset from the bottom-left.
Further, there’s no way to constrain the extended line during when using the align tool (like holding shift to lock an axis or angle), no snapping to axis, etc. The only thing I can ever snap to when using align is a marked point - example one of the two points shown on a fillet.
All this just ends in frustration and the software becomes unusable for accurate design work.
I love the concept of Shapr3D and it looks amazing in videos - even behaves amazing in the first few minutes of using it. But once you notice that some really basic abilities are missing (booleans on sketch elements too), then it becomes a real uphill battle. At that point it’s faster to use what is otherwise a more cumbersome traditional tool because they support these features. Even if you end up looking through a thousand menus and tool icons for accomplishing a myriad of other tasks that are simple in Shapr3D.
I can’t get snapping to work at all in MacOS. Not to a face, not to an edge, nothing. Makes it somewhat impossible to align 3D objects or sketch elements.
Do you have snapping settings turned on? They should be on by default but you could’ve turned them off while looking around.
Something as simple as placing a circle at a location offset a specific mm from the bottom and left of rectangle that has a fillet applied. It’s possible to use the align tool to position the center of a circle (or cylinder) to EITHER the left or bottom, but not both. Therefore impossible to get an accurate offset from the bottom-left.
Is that fillet applied in 2D on the sketch or in 3D? In case it’s in 2D, there are many ways to do this. One, if the fillet is symmetric and you want the circle to be in the middle as well is to make the circle concentric with the arc and then configure its diameter so that it’s the right distance from the edges. Another option is to draw the missing part of the sides as construction sketches and define the distance of the centerpoint from the intersection point (note that this one distance wouldn’t make the circle’s position fully defined).
But the same thing is possible if the fillet was done in 3D: you can constrain that new circle to the body edges as well in the same way, both setting explicit distances or a concentric constraint work:
But I might not be understanding your situation fully. Are these approaches not working/not effective/not intuitive for you? How would you do this in other CAD apps?
Further, there’s no way to constrain the extended line during when using the align tool (like holding shift to lock an axis or angle), no snapping to axis, etc. The only thing I can ever snap to when using align is a marked point - example one of the two points shown on a fillet.
I agree, Align is a bit crude right now with not enough fine controls. We plan to improve it in the near future. Until then, the best approach is usually to combine it with Translate that does offer the ability to snap to precise points.
