Hi Istvan.
I saw you say that you’ve given up spending time with your boy to work on this and I admire that, so I’m doing the same with my weekend to help communicate issues in a productive way, with examples.
I’ve had a long read through every post across the last few days and I don’t think that professional modellers are being listened too. Please bear in mind that we are modellers, not programmers. 75% of our work is moving forwards. I get that 75% of a programmers work is fixing bugs and looking backwards, but that’s not us. At least not all of us.
The fact that you said ‘we did not expect that for some users hiding sketches instead of deleting them will be such a dramatic change’ is a bit dismissive and condescending but… I also don’t see many posts giving you exact reasoning behind their problems. So I decided to read through everything and provide real samples of where workflow is being disrupted. Emphasis on workflow because small changes have a big impact when you’re doing things repeatedly, even if it’s just having to press an extra button.
A common theme with workflow issues does result from this now being a hybrid program. These are update concerns, not necessarily parametric ones, but I have included some of those too.
I’ve provided videos/images where possible and I’ve created a sample project just to demonstrate. Please imagine doing all of these multiple times over and over again.
1. Sketches
The hiding and unhiding of sketches is simple but it’s not intuitive. You have to go through each Sketch and batch them into a folder, like you had to before, and then hide them away. If you put them into folders (all sketches relating to a particular object for example) then the folders still show up in the item panel, whatever the filter is.
You can of course just leave them out of folders and filter them all out at once and be done with them. But then you’re constantly going back to look in the sketch folder when you’re working with new sketches that vanish after an extrusion, for example.
That being said, if you’re happy to go the parametric route. Then you probably do want sketches linked to the bodies that they represent. The only way to do this is to put them in a folder together which means that filtering is probably detrimental. Or you could start naming sketches. This all adds tiny amounts of additional work that piles up. Even implementing a double click, to replace the right click, when renaming something would have a large impact here, but this isn’t the place for feature requests.
This also gets confusing if a sketch is linked to 2 separate bodies. This happens if you use a sketch to create a hole and then use that same sketch to create the bolt that goes through it. Now you’re jumping back to direct modelling if you want to edit the bolt for example (ie to make an easier fit).
The biggest problem I see with Sketches is that it’s so open to human error that it could ruin a model and you might not know about it until it’s too late. An accidental delete or move can have catastrophic consequences on complex models.
It makes you paranoid. If you delete a body, the sketch stays and you’ve now got to click on each sketch to get rid of it and scour the scene to ensure it doesn’t mess with something else. Or put that into a junk folder (someone else’s clever idea) and forget about it.
2. Fillet/Face Offset
If you fillet something, it’s great that you can go back. But if you directly edit the fillet, you now have a face offset on top of the fillet. This is two separate dimensions on top of each other. It’s too open to human error here. If you go back and edit the fillet from 3mm to 1mm, your 1mm probably isn’t a real 1mm because of the face offset is acting against it. One example of the two systems work against each other.
3. Copying Objects
Copying and moving folders no longer gives you a new set of objects in a new folder, they appear within the same folder so you then have to move the objects out. On top of that, if you continue to move the folder, new empty folders appear. This is additional messing around. If you do the old 360° trick and you don’t have your folder open, you might think that it hasn’t copied, and now you’ve got two objects overlapping and don’t know about it.
You’ll see that this behaves slightly differently if a Sketch is in the folder (empty folders don’t appear.
This is probably the worst new feature for me personally. I’ve brought it up in here and on the Facebook page and had no response.
4. Single Plane Resizing
This almost coincides with moving objects away from their (un)linked Sketch but resizing a body put it on a completely different scale to the sketch. So if you’re going the parametric route then you might be playing around with a tiny sketch and look out at a larger body.
If you resize the sketch, the forward changes are all working off of exact dimensions rather than percentages so the bodies only change across 2 dimensions instead of 3. So you’d then have to go over everything and change all the dimensions individually. That’s a pain.
5. Red Writing
A bunch of my own projects have various items that are showing up red. I decided to download a few random files from Grabcad to see if it was a problem across the board but only one of them showed up with red writing. There’s no warnings or instructions on what to do here. I would be very worried about working with such a file as it feels like something could go very wrong.
That’s it, I think. Reading up it doesn’t look like huge problems, but encounter them again and again and they add to frustration. Your user base doesn’t just like what they had because that’s what they’re used to. They came to Shapr3D because they liked what you offered.
