Creating Complex Assemblies

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Hi Guys,

Firstly : I am totally impressed with this app and simplicity and speed of use and most likely your tutorials and response to forum questions. Very hands on with us as subscribers and very interactive. Keep up the amazing development.

I seem to have two profiles… One under craig@kfi.co.nz or www.kfi.co.nz which is my industrial “construction engineering” work and also in a sideline of orders@littleoak.co.nz which is our cafe and bakery business in which I design and build our new businesses and roll them out around our locality. You can find us on Facebook under Little Oak Cafe and Bakery

Background on CAD: I have used Archicad for 20 years and have difficulty in shifting to another program. I am learning Fusion 360 as the next most logical program for production of my designs. Logical because I operate on Mac and have difficulty in changing to Windows ( archicad operates perfectly on Mac ) Its very hard to to change once you have become intuitive with a particular program ! This is presumably why autodesk provides free licence to students, and maybe why I am learning Fusion360 on a Mac.

Lets be realistic to assume I have only utilised 5-10% of what is possible in Shapr3d … We can all see that it has tremendous scope already.

Complex Assemblies.
Utilising all my façade and engineering background I have an upcoming project designing a commercial greenhouse system for myself that will have fully automated pumping systems, and an automated feed system ( both electrically and mechanically ) integrated into this design.

As such I will need to create a library of modular parts to drag and drop / insert into my varying designs.

Aside from making all individual components on Shapr3d and exporting them to a layup platform of another program … is there a future or a way that you see this to be entirely possible in Shapr3d?

I have considered that “Inventor” is most likely the program I need to design a complete “Plant” design but I am just checking how I can pull this together in the most practical way hopefully utilising Shapr3d as the backbone to component design.

Regards

Craig Marshall

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I think I answered my own question :+1:

I just imported some 3d models from grab cad into my drawing and it worked a treat.

I now understand that I can keep expanding my model by simply having them on separate layers in " groups ".

I’m interested to see how far I can go before this starts to bog down in the sheer size of the file.

I would like to know how to simplify the objects to a solid. For example… once I have confirmed that a pump will work and is the correct size… I don’t need to have all the components of that pump available within the overall model of complex assemblies. I want to be able to able to safe that pump as a solid and minimise the data involved to I can keep modelling a larger “mechanical plant”.

The relief is in knowing that when I know the file gets too large for Shapr3D , I can simply export it and keep on growing the assembly.

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We’ve successfully imported and edited large assemblies in Shapr3D, up to 1000+ bodies and 100k+ edges and faces. We’ve worked a lot on optimizing the heck out of the app to run smooth even with large assemblies.

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This is so good. You will realise that most of our problems are simply our own by not spending enough time on the app yet or understanding exactly what is possible.

Your feedback and assistance in coaching us all in how to use this is awesome. Thank you.

Craig

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I have put together a presentation of this bracket design from, the problems with the “initial design and constraints in the building” through to my solution and how I demonstrated this to our designers/cad operators. The fact that they speak mandarin and I speak english is half the problem, so sometimes I need more than a sketch. Sometimes a “model” is exactly what they need.

Stand by for my presentation on how KFI could use shapr3d commercially.

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