I am new to shapr, still using the free version and assessing it. I’m finding it to be mostly a remarkable app which can be learned very quickly, however I have had a couple of issues.
I am trying to find a way of stretching and object, or to put it another way scaling in one dimension only. I did a bit of searching and found a number of historical posts and references to people requesting this which didn’t seem to lead too far. These go back a couple of years and it looked as though at the time the shapr team did not seem to appreciate the need for such functionality. Has anything changed and is there any means of doing this efficiently?
I mainly use shapr to design furniture, and one of the key aspects of such design is getting the proportionality right. So having produced an initial prototype design it often has to be stretched or compressed in various dimensions to get a nice-looking proportion. If the piece consists of rectilinear components this can be achieved with a bit of effort using extruded. However if designing something like an organic shaped chair then this approach does not work.
To give an example of what I’m referring to, there is a YouTube video showing experienced user building a model of the Eames lounge chair (link below). This video demonstrates both the skill of the user and the capacity of shapr 3d. However the user has the benefit of knowing the correct proportions and dimensions in advance. I’m quite sure that when Charles and Henry Eames developed their prototype they would have had to have stretched and pushed the initial concept in various directions to get things right. It is still common in chair design for designers to build a full-scale mockup to achieve this. Such adjustments should be easy in a system like shapr and as best I can figure it currently isn’t so.
Any advice on this matter or suggestions would be much appreciated.
Thanks
Murray
Hi @MurrayWP, thank you for your feedback, we know that this feature is a missing one. Although single dimension scaling is not available yet, direct modeling makes it possible to just select certain faces and move them to get the shape you are looking for
Hi Peter, thanks very much for that suggestion. Unfortunately I think it has limited application for what I want to do, sometimes doesn’t work on very complex objects and won’t work globally on a complete object.
I believe there were a few historical requests in this forum going back some time, for this functionality. The response at the time seem to be that it would be implemented, is this still the case?
I hope we get this soon. I find it to be a major omission (so much so that I’ve finally signed up to this forum to add my voice to the discussion).
I’ve imported some bolts that I want to be able to stretch (obviously changing the thread pitch) to customize for the model. This simply isn’t possible at the moment. I’ll have to use another tool and re-import to Shapr3D.
I’ve had other instances where I really wanted this too, and instead had to use complex work arounds.
Any idea of the timeline for getting this feature?
This feature would be very valuable when importing “stock” objects from CAD communities to model things like architecture, furniture, etc. It’s much easier to quickly “fit” stock objects into a scene by resizing along one dimension at a time, even if the object gets a bit distorted.
For all the other powerful features in Shapr3D, I’m a bit amazed this hasn’t already been added.
I think the non-equal proportional scaling that you have repeatedly emphasized is definitely not just a uniaxial scaling similar to cube or rectant, which is too easy to achieve. It is not in the scope of discussion, but a uniaxial scaling of an elliptic body like a football. Flatten or lengthen it on the basis of not modifying the sketch.
Funny you mentioned a football. I’ve modeled a rugby ball, a prolate spheroid, and stretched it on its long axis, to produce a form which I turned on my CNC router to produce a rolling pin for my wife, from the last remaining log from a tree we cut down. I modeled it in vectorworks, which, I’m told, also uses the Siemens engine…
That’s great! There are too many 3D software. In 3D MAX, non-equal scale is a basic function. What we are talking about now is looking forward to seeing it in Shapr3D. Since using Shapr3D, the modeling of standard parts, I have almost no longer used other 3D software. I believe more and more people will like Shapr3D.
