New Shapr3D user, watched some of the tutorial videos to try and get a handle on things.
Not a professional but have designed practical projects for 3d printing. Experience with Fusion, OnShape and FreeCAD. Tried Plasticity and didn’t care for it at all. I believe I tried Shapr3D a few years ago but didn’t catch on and found it again from a YouTube video.
First thoughts/challenges:
Why is there there no “point” privative in sketches? I often use free floating points to locate geometry, then constrain it with quick measurements. From the tutorials it looks like the workaround is to use lines and derive either endpoints from those or cross points. This seems silly and unnecessary to me.
No way to Mirror/Pattern a feature? I mean I’m placing mounting holes in a simple plate and sure I can pattern within the sketch but no way to pattern the cut extrude nor does the extrude automatically replicate because its a known pattern on the sketch feature. I thought for sure I was missing something here but saw there is a feature request already.
Can you not Extrude to a face/feature/body without later editing the Extrude in History? You can only extrude by a measurement? I couldn’t figure this out at all. To me it would make sense that the same options available of an Extrude in history are available while you’re configuring the Extrude, similar to most other tools. I must be missing something obvious.
I found it odd that all the main body features are under Tools and there was no way to “pin” several tools as common top level left menu items like Fillet/Extrude/Project.
I see variables are a relatively new feature but they aren’t very usable during modeling. When inputting a value, referencing a variable that doesn’t exist yet should let you create it. Most other tools work this way and its much faster. I found myself in a cycle of “input dummy value”, “exit that step”, “create variable”, “add real value”, “edit step again”, “replace dummy value with varaible/function”. Seemed really tedious.
I didn’t find smart dimensioning very intuitive. It wasn’t clear to me when something would get a dimension added (like clicking a line after it was created). I appreciate when tools try and help and automatically work in context, but a discrete “dimension” tool would help a new user out to KNOW they were dimensioning something instead of having to click around to figure out the right thing to trigger autodimensioning. I’m sure once you get used to it its fine, but for a new user it created a lot of friction. This and no “point” primitive were real blockers for me.
Anyway, just wanted to give my feedback. If I missed something maybe other users can let me know a better way or another tutorial to watch.
You can extrude to a face by dragging to the target until it selects that surface and then let go. There isn’t a way to simply select what to extrude and then select the target. While the drag and snap way is welcome, I do wish they also allowed you to select the target closer to how the align tool works.
I’m not sure that I follow what you are saying. Everything that is drawn will get a dimension. If you set a dimension, it automatically gets locks. You can lock/unlock dimensions at any time. I’m not sure that a separate dimensioning tool will be helpful.
None of that was obvious to me. Here’s the workflow I didn’t understand:
Create a sketch.
Draw a line, but don’t input a value for the dimension input that pops up.
When you complete that operation, the dimension “ruler” disappears.
How do I now manually dimension this line? Measure isn’t it.
Playing with it now I see that if i set a dimension in the dialog, the lock appears with the dimension. If you unlock it, the dimension display goes away. I don’t know how to get it back either. Edit: oh now I see. You select the line again. I was selecting the endpoint, thinking I was selecting the line.
So what you explained makes sense now. I completely missed that because I was selecting the endpoints of the sketch object thinking it was the object itself.
