Shapr3D

Shapr3D is a CAD product aimed at the portable and easy-to-use CAD market. It originated as tablet cad, but has grown to much more than that. The product has been around for a number of years, so they’re no longer really “new”, but as CAD companies go they are young. I had been peripherally aware of them for a while until they hired me to do a series of youtube videos which you can see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl3M9Sh_jlE&list=PLi4l3wxwkqyxPD2QuSdfZavO_CYwub-7d

This part of the CAD market (low cost easy to use conceptual modelers) is probably pretty crowded, but Shapr3D has stood out to me for a few reasons. The first thing I picked up on when I started to use it was that it was different from the ground up. It was built to be portable, and the interface is slimmed down and streamlined compared to any 25-30 year old CAD product you might find out there. It only makes available the tools that can be used at the present time. So if you have nothing on the screen, the only thing you can really do is sketch. If you’re sketching, there are more sketch tools. If you have a sketch but nothing else, there is a list of features you can make. So yes, you have to be familiar with a certain workflow (sketch-feature), but that’s not exactly a high hurdle.

You might expect a portable-capable CAD system to allow you to sketch with your fingers, but alas, this isn’t the case. I think you’d come to a similar conclusion if you ever have really tried to do that. CAD is about precision, and you just can’t get precision with a fat finger. I recommend a stylus or pen for sketching on a Wacom tablet or a touch screen. It just works out a lot better, and with the button(s) on the stylus, you have more options.

Another thing that you realize early on is that Shapr3D is also different in how you use the software. First, it can be installed and used on tablets (iPad or Windows), laptops (Apple or Windows) and desktop. And second, it is NOT a web app – you install on your local computer, but the data is stored on the cloud. You can bring individual files down to your local computer, but the data was really meant to be shared.

that it was actually fun to use. For those of us who are obsessed with modeling the world around us, you could probably say that about a lot of CAD tools, but it’s different for Shapr3D. The fun-to-use aspect combined with the interface that allows you to discover features as you have need for them really resonated with me. Another fun example of the interface was that there was no icon for creating fillets. You simply click and drag an edge out to make a fillet, or push the edge the other way to make a chamfer.

And because the whole thing was based on Parasolid, the modeling is very strong. I was able to accomplish a lot with Shapr3D even if the feature selection isn’t as sophisticated as other CAD packages. For example, this motorcycle gas tank was achieved with a series of revolves. Tedious? Maybe, but so is setting up complicated loft features.

I also had a couple of criticisms for the software. First, when you would sketch from the origin, it wouldn’t create a relationship to the origin. In fact, you just had to lock down a point because you couldn’t assign a sketch relation with the origin. For a “best practice” kind of guy, that was really frustrating. Kind of minor and easily fixable, which makes it even more frustrating.

Second was the lack of assemblies. Shapr3D forces you to rely on multibody operations. I’ve spent a lot of time and energy working on how and when to use multibodies, and everything you’re forced into here is definitely NOT on the best practice list, but you can make a lot of things work with a little ingenuity.

Another minor complaint was the inability to pattern cut features. You had to create the cut as positive material, pattern the body, and then Boolean the bodies. After so many years with Solidworks, finding workarounds when things don’t work the way you expect them to is just second nature.

The final criticism came late in my video project. Shapr3D started out as a direct edit software. Direct edit suited the interface unbelievably well. It made sense. It worked. It was fast to edit. I really liked Shapr3D on direct edit.

But then there was an update, and they switched to history-based modeling. It seems like they did this because someone thought that they weren’t being taken seriously without a history tree. I don’t know, I’m just guessing about this. But for the audience they wanted to address, and the rest of the capabilities in the software, and especially due to the simple and highly usable nature of the interface, I thought that direct edit suited the product very well – much better, in fact, than history-based modeling.

Users always seem to confuse the word “parametric” with the term “history-based”. Shapr3D was definitely already parametric – driven by parameters – without the added complication of using a recipe- or programming-like ordered list of features. I think in general in the industry, most users are irrationally attached to history-based modeling. Probably because they have never known anything else. 30 years ago it was different – teaching/learning history-based modeling was a conceptual leap that difficult to make.

You can see in the image above that there are two lists: the one on the right is the history list. The one one the left is a list of items such as planes, bodies, sketches and such. It helped declutter the history list and proved that the history-based list wasn’t completely necessary to make edits.

Anyway, it was fun for me to figure out how to use the history list, but the software lost a lot of it’s elegance when shifting between the two methods.

Shapr3D seems to have a fast-paced development schedule, and things get added to the function list all the time. Even the CEO Istvan Csanady was available to answer many of my questions. He’s an obviously driven guy, and his group for the most part have done a great job with this software that is still actively evolving.

If you haven’t tried it out, you should. It’s not going to replace a complex CAD system this year, but if you have simple projects that need collaboration, or you have untrained personnel who need CAD, Shapr3D is a great option.