Copy and paste-able history

Please follow the format below for requesting a feature.

The problem that this feature will solve:

Once you’ve built a feature whose build process you’d like to re-use, but at a different size, on a different body, it would be super useful to be able to identify the feature, isolate its construction history and be able to paste that onto somewhere else.

Brief description of the outcomes that you expect from this feature:

An example would be to be able to design ribs in a wing that are bounded by an upper wing skin, a lower wing skin, a forward spar and an aft spar at a particular reference plane location. You’d model the first such rib, create the location of the next rib reference plane, select the original rib and its history back as far as the inputs and copy the procedure to the new location. Shapr3D would then build a new rib body at the new location by the same process. Note that the user would not need to code the procedure, just re-use it.
Other examples are for things like holes with counter-bores at different diameters and depths, threads of different diameters and lengths that use the same thread form, etc.

What can’t you achieve without this feature?

Whilst not a workflow blocker as such, its absence prevents acceleration. There are many times in design where you’re redoing what you did before, the long way. This kind of re-use is well implemented in Catia with Powercopies (an under-appreciated feature there too), and it saves many hours of work and allows you to elevate your design intent and activities to a higher level than the laborious sketch-trim-extrude-boolean-repeat style of workflow. Shapr3D has the opportunity to implement similar high-level functionality in a more user-friendly manner as you continually prove that no-one does UI in CAD like you guys do.

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Makes total sense. Can’t give you an exact delivery date, but something like this is top of mind for us.

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Honestly, being able to save steps as reusable actions would be incredible. Especially if they were shareable.

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Shareable would also be good because it would mean that these saved construction methods could form the basis of some other vertical integrations like the threads and gears and other things that keep coming up in feature requests. The features could be community sourced.

One snag that this could have is in the positioning of sketched construction features on the destination geometry. Shapr3D doesn’t have a sketch origin other than the global origin, so positioning a sketch that is part of the pasted history steps in this idea would need the implementation of a ref axis system object in sketches that makes the positioning and orientation of sketched construction certain.