I tried the HBPM beta of Shapr3D and I finally found with the help of an advanced user (thanks, Alex ;-)) how to propagate changes made to an object to several copies of this object, collectively and all at once. But I must say that it only mimics by a long shot what the OP showed in his concept pictures with the ideal “Create Component” button.
In the beta, if we want to change the shape of several duplicated instances of an object (duplicated through the Copy or Pattern tools), we have to:
-
Make modifications to the “master” of that object, i.e. the first object that was created before the duplicated batch. It doesn’t work if the modifications are made on any of the copies – a real difference with true “components” (in the sense of the late Macromedia/Adobe Flash Professional app) which are all the same.
-
If the modifications were not applied before the duplication stage, you can move a subsequent modification higher up in the History to propagate it to the copies; it’s not intuitive at first, but it’s good that the possibility exists.
-
Above all, these modifications absolutely need to be done from the new “History” pane located on the right. Not at all in the main interface.
Point #3 is the culprit. It really makes things unnecessarily cumbersome and limited in scope, and very unShapr3D-like. You may say that’s the necessary other side of the HBPM coin, but…
The real strength, and the groundbreaking nature of Shapr3D with respect to anything else available on the market is that it was (still is!) an elegant and simple application that gave us a true satisfactory “analog” feeling of modeling and manipulating objects directly at the tip of a pencil VS other “white elephant” softwares which gave the off-putting feeling of manipulating levers, gauges, buttons and arithmetic values on control panels to achieve the same thing. That killer feature is the only reason why I accept to pay a quite high annual fee to use your app instead of say, Blender for free. And I don’t think I am the only one, I even believe it is reason #1 for most of your customers.
Now, I understand that adding HBPM is a lot of work to be translated in a clear and intuitive interface. But if we’re gonna have to apply arithmetic values in a History control panel just to mimic components that actually don’t exist as is, instead of direct modeling any occurence of true components with the Pencil, then it’s not worth it, in terms of this particular feature at least. It becomes like anything else that is non user-friendly.
Clearly, what the user base wants and is asking is what the OP showed: a “Make Component” button that transforms any independent selected object in a TRUE Component, that is to say, when this component is duplicated X times through Copy or Pattern, any later change to it (or to any of its multiple linked copies! Here I go even further than the OP, there would be no more “master”) through direct modeling with the Pencil will affect all other occurrences accordingly at the same time. THIS is the real “Instances & Components” feature we’re looking for.
This has been asked for many years out of this thread, see for example here, or here, or there too, among others). I note however that this was not possible before because, quoting @Istvan by April 2023 from the 3rd link above:
Hence it seems alright then, because now comes the HBPM surprise officially!
So the question is: do you plan at some point in your roadmap to implement such “true Component” feature in Shapr3D, the way the OP explained before me, in a direct modeling way in the UI using the power of the HBPM engine under the hood?
