Items Panel UI Enhancements

Feature requests
1

The Items panel could be SO much better and more useful than it is today, with a few UI changes. In no particular order, here’s what I would suggest:

  1. Selecting a body or object does select it in the Items list, but that selection is often invisible, for a couple of reasons: Either the item is simply scrolled off the visible list (so you now have to guess whether to scroll up or down to find the thing that’s already selected somewhere!), or, even more confusingly, the selected item’s type is not selected in the filter box at the top (confusingly making scrolling futile), or . Selecting an item should not only select it in the list, but also reset the the list filters and scrolling so that that item is clearly visible in the list without having to hunt for it. (Defaulting back to the “All Items” type when resetting is the easiest and perhaps most intuitive here.)

  2. Make the Items panel list searchable - The best way to implement this is probably like this: Clicking on either the “Items” title of the panel, (or maybe selecting anything from the Item type filter box, but that presents other issues) should instantly put you into a substring search mode (show a text search field, already in focus, or maybe, flip to a “Search” pseudo Item type) where you can then “just type” to find the item you’re looking for (e.g. “bench profile”) and the matching items will show in the list. If there is more than one match, show only those to allow selection, or if it’s the only match, select it by default.

  3. Allow common sense group operations* on all items in an Item type filter group. *Basically, most of the items in the right-click context menu for things in the Items list, especially Show/Hide (toggle visibility), Isolate, Zoom To, or New Drawing (which should also work for sketches, see below…) e.g., Sketches frequently leave dimensions littering the model like this:

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I should be able to select “Sketches” in the Items filter pulldown and hide all this crap at once. This is especially important because it seems that Shapr3D wants you to create new sketches for pretty much every operation, or it’s going to make you pay later for not doing that. I’ve yet to create even very simple designs without rapidly collecting dozens of sketches, many of which leave “dimension droppings” all over my model. It should be easy to hide them all at once. (Yeah, I get that undoing that mass hiding isn’t easy, but the selection suggestion above helps that a lot, especially if you’re naming items as you go along.

By the way, Sketching in general could use SO much help - geometry creation is easier in Shapr3D than in many other CAD packages, but it is far, far behind some CAD systems of literally 40 years ago. Without turning this into a huge list of suggestions to improve Sketching in general, I’ll just note that since sketches are literally the controlling geometry of the model, it’s completely baffling to me that you can’t export a Sketch as a drawing sheet!

2 Likes
2

Also, forgot to mention - It looks like you can do some of this with Folders, but they are really, really painful to use. A big part of that is that they are not available to be filtered in the Items panel filter pulldown. Once again, you just have to scroll through a zillion things to try to find the Folder you want. There should be a Folder category in the pulldown, but if this isn’t done, it makes an even stronger case for a search by name capability in the Items panel…

3

Absolutely agree with that last sentence. Creating a drawing from a sketch seems like a fundamental feature and intuitive to me as a new user.

4

OMG, the folder implementation is horrible.

It took me forever to figure out exactly where to precisely hover with my selections in order to dump sketches into a previous folder, without them instead ending up outside the target folder, either above it or below it.

And the scrolling is ridiculous. If I have elements at the top of my Items list, but I want to put them in an older folder–which is down at the bottom of the list and as you mentioned, way off the bottom of the screen–there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to do that. You can’t just drag all the items because–unlike most programs-- if you hover with the mouse at the bottom edge of the list-- nothing happens. It doesn’t keep scrolling.