Please follow the format below for requesting a feature.
The problem that this feature will solve:
At the moment it takes several clicks to either subtract one body from another or to split a body along a face or plane. In the case of subtraction, an update earlier this year also changed the behavior of this process to be that it always defaults to deleting the tool body (as opposed to remembering the last setting used), and so requires more clicks to change that if necessary (which for me is almost always).
This is further frustrated by the way the tools displayed on the left side are not consistently in the same order because they are trying to preempt the user by displaying only tools relevant to a selection (this is not actually helpful can I turn it off?), and which get shoved into “more,” combined with the fact that there is no keyboard shortcut for splitting bodies.
(and the infuriating behavior where, when trying to change the tool/target face or body, if you misclick and have been laboriously selecting a large number of faces or bodies, you now have nothing selected, or a single thing selected with everything else deselected, and the tool has been put away, forcing you literally as far back into this process as is possible without undoing steps entirely)
I am using these two functions, subtract and split (and then union to put bodies back together with thin slices or chunks removed), hundreds if not thousands of times in each project. There are physical, mental, and time taxes in needing to click this many times, and scrutinize the tool menu as if seeing it for the first time, and needing multiple attempts to make the right selection for it to work, when I know that in the end I am going to be doing it so often, when I know that on paper what I am doing is the same two steps every time.
What can’t you achieve without this feature?
It is a speed issue and an ease of use issue. Firstly I think being able to assign any tool to a key should be a feature, although I understand that the focus of this app is largely on tablets.
But ideally the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts is essential to any application if it’s meant to raise someone’s efficiency, and then if there are options within that tool (selection of bodies and faces, assigning tool/target, clicking confirm, etc) these need to be assignable as well, ie the shortcut should generally never be the “enter” key (because I have to look down to move my left hand across the entire keyboard or remove my right hand from the mouse, click enter, and then grab the mouse again, also requiring me to look down).
Is this a workflow blocker for you? Is this why you can’t use Shapr3D for work? Is this slowing you down?
It is at times a little annoying and at other times viscerally infuriating.
On paper the process for a simple split is
- select a face or plane
- select bodies to split
- confirm
This technically only requires a single hotkey, two if you include ESC to cancel. At the moment I have to pan my eyes all over the place back and forth, I can never have my hands in even the same region of my desk, it’s just too arduous for something this simple.
If the key was ‘A’, just as an example, I would select a face, click ‘A’, then most likely drag across everything on the screen, and then click ‘A’ again to confirm, with ‘S’ or ESC being to cancel (which should NOT close the tool entirely, it should only deselect the bodies, and keep the tool face the same. I cannot stress this enough)
That process could take less than a second on a fast machine. But it is impossible currently for the process to be faster than 10-20 seconds. That doesn’t sounds significant but when you are doing it a thousand times, it becomes significant very quickly. In my primary job I spend a lot of time trying to smooth out interfaces and workflows to minimize this exact kind of mental and eye fatigue.
*Note: I use this application almost exclusively on PC. I am also generally not designing tools or parts, where the sketch is very rigidly defined beforehand. This app has been a MUCH more user friendly way to hack out sculpted or abstract things, which I can then print and iterate on when precise measurements of things in the real world are not possible (for example how far is it from the keyboard plate to the bottom of the keycap? I can get close, but this type of thing has to simply get printed and make small adjustments until it fits).
I can tell that some changes to the behavior of the tool bar and to the steps within each tool were meant to be helpful but in general I am WAY more frustrated in trying to accomplish anything than I was before.*