I’m not sure how many others deal with this, but I’ve learned that being organized with CAD makes things way easier, especially when you return to a project after some time.
- Please add nested folders to Parametric History
The folders in Shapr3D definitely help with organizing the construction items, but there is a gaping hole in the Parametric History that could benefit from a similar folder-based structure.
The existing “Related to Selection” filter is better than nothing, but contextually, I am always trying to find the place in history when I was working on a specific feature of my model. For example, that might mean when I’m working on my custom keyboard case, I want to find the actions related to the initial stages of creating the top plate and I want to keep that separate from refining the look and feel of it that I typically do at the very end.
Similarly, I may want to group the activities related to building the main case, and might even have sub-features within that which have multiple steps - creating the battery recess or creating the reset switch cutout, etc.
Having nested folders for history would go a long way towards staying organized in a meaningful way.
One would ideally be able to suppress/unsuppress features in a folder to quickly toggle logically grouped features and be able to quickly find and update a design.
This also applies heavily to variables where being able to group and nest them would be extremely useful.
- Please add an optional “Prompt to rename feature” after a feature when a feature is first created.
This one may speak more to my own personal workflow, but I try to stay organized by renaming features to something related to what I’m actually doing, not what the technical tool is.
For example, I may be extruding a set of planes, but really I’m “Cutting key switch holes in the top plate”, or I may be adding a chamfer to screw holes but really I’m “Relieving screw holes for easy screw insertion”.
Sometimes I forget to go back and rename a feature but I almost always want to. It would be nice if Shapr3D could prompt me the first time a feature is created to do so.
That leads me to a few other quality-of-life organizational features…
- Provide a way to view truncated list item text.
Especially on the iPad, text in lists often gets truncated, sometimes making it impossible to tell what item is what unless I open it - defeating the purpose of a label, especially when I have gone through the trouble to give really descriptive names.
On the iPad with the Apple Pencil (at least the newer versions) AND on Mac and I’m assuming PC, at the very least showing the full text on hover would be great.
But on iPad it would also be nice if we were able to horizontally scroll the line item to see it. It might also be nice to have the option to control how it gets truncated. For example, it might be better in my workflow to truncate the middle part of the text but show the beginning and the end because I typically word things like “Do action to target for rationale” and if I can see the rationale I can usually infer what the middle part was.
- Improved auto-naming features.
This one might be a bit of a stretch, but please hear me out.
Shapr isn’t alone here - I think most CAD software I’ve used does not really help users organize their work, defaulting to features named things like “Extrude 01”, etc.
Especially when there is no other context, I find those names to be practically useless, leading to the workflow I described where I prefer to rename a feature immediately after creating it.
What if we take the feature request to have a prompt to rename a feature one step further?
If the feature yields a body, it could prompt for the body’s name first and use that in its auto-rename strategy.
For example, instead of “Extrude 01” if I named the body “Main Housing”, it could pre-populate the feature name with “Extrude Main Housing” - while still giving me the opportunity to edit the feature name further.
Going even further, future features should probably reference the name so if a chamfer is next applied, it might be named “Chamfer Main Housing”. Numbers could still be used to de-dupe, but one can quickly see that looking at the history would start to give a lot more context for what’s going on in a design just by providing a little bit more input.
As a stretch goal, it’d be great to be able to define a set of rules for how this all happens - a templating language if you will, so that standards can be established.