Hi everyone, noob here. I had a lot of experience with Sketchup and I’m in a process of switching over to Shapr3D since I will be using 3D printing and CNC routing more in my business. I’m getting used to contraints and parametric modeling but it’s taking a lot of practice.
I’ve gone through a lot of tutorials, but wasn’t sure if there was a way to create a dynamic array. To better describe what I mean, imagine a shelving unit that has holes drilled every 50mm vertically for shelf pins. If I change the height of the side walls in the initial sketch of the sides, the unit updates as expected. However, the holes I created with the Pattern tool did not extend to add more holes. Is there a way to do this?
So as a beginner to parametric modeling and Shapr3D, something that still confuses me is what operations should be drawn in a sketch, and what operations should be done to the bodies, to make things easiest.
For example, when designing the side of the bookcase we’ve been using as an example, I was putting all the holes in the sketch using Pattern within the sketch, and then extruding them through the body afterward. But it seems like it would be more efficient to draw only one hole, then use a Pattern to multiply the hole in the 3D body.
There is no “best practice”, it’s a matter of your workflow and what you want to achieve. In mechanical design, most engineers prefer to define all the dimensions, shapes and relationships in their sketches. Often this is the best way to create a proper parametric model. However, there are always exceptions, and Shapr3D gives you the freedom to decide how you want to work.
Great point. That is starting to (slowly) penetrate my brain now. I didn’t realize at first that sketching operations do not appear individually in the history, but operations on bodies do.
