Hi,
A few questions on features that would make Shapr3D great for designing for laser cutting pieces that will be assembled into 3d objects.
I’ve watched a bunch of videos and scoured forums, but am not an active user yet so please forgive any ignorance.
Here’s my wish list. Would love to know which of these are possible now or on your near-term roadmap:
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Interpolate x copies: Make an object, then copy it and make limited modifications to the copy (stretch it, move some vertices, etc). Then select both and ask Shapr3D to interpolate additional copies, specifying how many copies (steps of interpolation). This basically the 3D equivalent of the “make blend” function in Illustrator.
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Copy and translate/rotate: In this Shapr3D tutorial video “creating the fins - electric motor” it shows creating one fin, then manually copying, rotating, copying, rotating. For designing quickly and iterating, it would be very helpful to automate that so you can specify number of copies and how many degrees to rotate per copy, and/or how many mm to translate per copy along a given axis.
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Instances of a master object: Continuing with the fins in #2, could all the copies retain a connection to the original, so when you edit the original, all the copies update too. Similar to what Sketchup does with copied objects until you tell it to “make unique”.
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Export faces to 2d file: For laser cutting, designing in 3D helps to visualize the material thickness as you work with angles and notches and spatial relationships to get all the design right, but then you need to get all those pieces back to a 2D format to feed to the laser cutter. The best example I found of this functionality is this video demo of a Sketchup plugin: “Export Faces to SVG” where you can manually select individual flat faces of a bunch of objects, then export all of those, and regardless of the angles those objects are at in the 3D file, it knows how to orient them all into a single 2D plane (janky demo but it does show it working: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe2PkRSlLCI).
–It’d be even better if there was an option to skip the manual step and export one flat surface from each object (assuming all the pieces are flat extruded designs so it’s pretty easy to tell which faces are the design).
Thanks so much!
Shapr3D is amazing, really nice work!
If it can do things like these, I’ll go buy an ipad pro this week and get started!
Best,
Jesse Kocher