I‘m trying the software out having thought it might be more intuitive than the desktop tools I’ve been using but thoroughly disappointed. Am I missing some neat feature?
Selecting seems to be hit or miss, sketching and in particular the spline tool is awful and for creating 3D shapes simple things like sweeping with a spine and guide(s), variable chamfers/fillets seems to be unavailable
Is this the full extent of what the app can do? It seems a very small step on from Tinkercad and a long way short of Fusion 360
Hi @GannetScaleModels , welcome to the community. I’m sorry to hear that you are struggling with selecting objects! Can you share a video that demonstrates the issue? Sweep is definitely available in Shapr3D, you can learn more about it here. Variable radius chamfers and fillets are not yet available. We hear you on the spline tool, we are working on making it much more easy to use.
Shapr3D is not really comparable to TinkerCAD, as Shapr3D is a Parasolid based modeling tool, with Visualization and Drawings functionality, built for professionals.
I’m not sure what a video will add. The selection just seems to sometimes accept a click o;the feature or line I want to modify but far more often something highlight something else in the background. Even a simple design like the attached has taken several frustrating hours and is crude while for far less time in Fusion 360 I’d have something much much better
Got it, makes sense. Shapr3D is indeed needs more freeform modeling features to be an ideal tool for aircraft design. If you could provide more details on the selection issues, we’d love to fix them. Unfortunately without seeing the problem, it’s very hard to figure out what’s going wrong. We don’t have any open issues at the moment in the selection functionality that could explain this problem, and a video always helps a lot to understand where we could do better. For the recording under Settings>Shapr3D you can turn on showing touches and Pencil as an overlay, which would help a lot with understanding the issue.
Sorry, Can’t attach video as the forum software tells me that as new user that I can’t add attachments.
Sweep comment was that it only allows a sweep along a path but no option for a guide rail so any sweep only has a uniform shape. e.g. for something like the wing this is a big barrier to being able to work quickly and precisely
Attached - trying to split a body using a sketch. Clicking on one then the other just doesn’t appear to do anything useful. Click on the body and it disappears, try to click on the outline I want to become a cut and the results are never the same twice.
I can imagine the potential of this app but the current iteration really isn’t it
I see. I misunderstood the problem. Indeed in the Split body tool, you can’t select sketches, but surfaces for the split operation. The easiest way to do this is to simply extrude a body from that sketch, and use that surface to split the body.
Have spent more time trying to come to grips with the app but am admitting defeat with a design partly done. Trying to create smooth uniform spline curves to trim things is far from good, chamfers and fillets are crude, the process of creating guide rails that connect the winglets to the ends of the wing to loft smoothly round is just painful.
This should be a simple design to create but the app falls short of the potential by a long way. Based on the trial there is no way I’d switch to use the app long term even if the full function app were free. There is just too much that is clumsy or only half functional
Hi @GannetScaleModels , I understand that Shapr3D does not work for your use case. Indeed, Shapr3D is not lacking plenty of tools that are necessary for aircraft design. With our bi-weekly updates we are improving Shapr3D rapidly, and at some point of time we’ll have a broader set of features for freeform surface design.
Thanks, I’ll check back now and again to track progress. I know from speaking to another person in a similar field that this was also their impression from trying it out in an academic environment
It wasn’t particularly aircraft focussed - some general discussion with a friend working at a university where they’d tried the app out in a few use cases. Design department were positive, engineering department weren’t impressed.
I’m setting up a small makerspace in a location where there are lots of artists so I thought I’d try the app out as a potentially more accessible way of getting into 3D design for them and just tried the aircraft as a straightforward first example to test it out
HI, Peter of Shapr3D suggested me to shell a body to form a Body Split plane. It works. I shelled to a thickness of 0.001mm. I just have to
increase the separated body by 0.001mm later.
This is the 0.001mm plane that I made this way. The four sides had been deleted:
