Free hand

Is there a way to draw free hand ?

Currently no.

This would indeed be a very nice improvement for a designer. I’d like to have two options… A hand drawn freehand arc would automagically be interpreted as a degree 2 bezier spline - and a hand drawn s-shape would become a degree 3 bezier.

As any design usually starts as a free hand sketch (in product design, architecture, etc) the above mentioned ability to interpret hand drawn free form curves as bezier splines would make this software take a giant step in usability for a product designer.

As it is now I feel that Shapr is more geared towards mechanical (boxy) design, but this added ā€œfree handā€ feature would really make it much more usable for the whole design process in ā€œfree formā€ product design and ā€˜advanced’ architecture as well - perhaps even automotive design early in the design process.

We would of course also need to have the ability to combine different free form shapes (also on a surface level), blending between them (G1…G4) and so on - but that’s a different story.

What do you think @Istvan_CEO_Shapr3D? Would free hand drawing be feasible to implement? I really think it would be a very important addition.
Thanks!

Philip

Technically it is possible, but how would you use it?

I was trying to create letters for personalization of objects. Ive seen some models at various sites that have very nice lettering.

I would use it for sketching :wink: A more flexible alternative to the arc- and spline-functionality we have now - when doing ā€œform-findingā€ in the early stages of the design process. To me as a designer it seems quite obvious what it would be used for, but I’m perhaps not so good at explaining it to a developer. Sorry about that…

To be able to use open curves for modelling we would probably also need surface modelling possibilities - at the moment we can’t use open curves for extruding, lofting, etc. When modelling the outer surfaces (the ā€œA-class surfacesā€, if you will) for a product you usually only need the outer surface. No need to make the ā€˜skin’ a solid - that would come later in the process.

Thanks for listening :grinning:

Philip

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So basically you would use it as a more dynamic alternative for splines?

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Hmmm, well I guess you could say so - depending on the implementation … but yeah, that’s basically it! :+1:

Philip

Am I wrong or if you want to freehand can’t you do that on paper, scan or take pic, convert to image or sag and import and convert. I may be misunderstanding how that all works but I do understand how awesome it would be to be able to freehand a lot of those important parts or hard to get to spaces.

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I like the sound of this too much. Furthermore, freeform bending of a surface is outstanding too as suggested by @Philip