Is Shapr3D the Easiest CAD for 3d Printing Product Design?

hi this is irv shapiro with the make with tech channel formerly the dr vax channel just about a week ago i did a video about how to use computer aided design cad for 3d printing and in that video i looked at oh about a dozen different programs and i recommended three programs that i use a lot and i explained why i chose those programs one of the factors was that they were free for hobbyists in fact in the case of the three programs i recommended they were free for everyone and i explained that for someone using it for a hobby spending as much money for a computer-aided design program as they spend on their 3d printer might be a bit of a stretch might be difficult and that if i was using a cad program professionally i would probably use fusion 360. in the comments to every video i make about 3d printers about slicers about cad programs about electronics someone always says have you tried i love those comments because they help me learn new things and this channel is all about learning together so in the comments a viewer asked have i looked at shaper 3d and i have looked at it but about three four years ago maybe maybe even a little longer when it first came out for the ipad and shaper 3d initially was a program limited to the ipad to allow you to use cad on a tablet now i didn't have an apple pencil at the time so i tried using it with my finger and it was frustrating i didn't like the experience i didn't think it was very practical but since a viewer recommended it i thought i'd take another look and wow this program has come a long way shaper 3d is a very usable program now on an ipad but more importantly for people like me that prefer to do their design primarily from a desktop or a laptop it has both mac and windows editions the windows edition is quite new and not fully fleshed out but the mac edition is quite impressive in this video i'm going to take a look at shaper 3d and i'm going to ask a very important question is it worth 4 cups of coffee a month because it will cost you about 20 bucks a month if you want to use that versus let's say free cad or tinkercad or open s-cad which are all completely free so stay tuned and let's learn something together [Music] i tried out shape 3r on both my macbook pro on my imac and on a windows computer but i tried it on a windows computer both as a computer and as a tablet because i have a surface go which is my travel computer now that might seem like a strange choice for a die hard apple fanboy which i probably would qualify as but i really wanted something that i could use as a true computer with full versions of software specifically i needed at the time to be able to use a full version of chrome to work on this youtube channel i've shared with you before that when i look at a website it tells me a lot about what the goals of a computer program are and in this particular case it's very clear that the goal of shaper 3d is to make cad easier to make computer design easier when we go to their pricing page you'll see that there is a free edition but it's not it's usable enough to try out the program but you couldn't really use it day to day if you're going to use it day to day this is a program you're going to have to pay for now you could pay 20 a month on an annual contract or basically 42 dollars a month on an annual contract the difference between the two is predominantly the ability to import and export in more formats that means you could share your programs with more traditional cad programs you can do some of that in the standard edition you can do more of that in the business edition but there's one major difference in the business edition they add a drawing module what they mean by that is the module you can use to take your 3d plans and convert them to 2d drawings that would be you would give to someone else in a manufacturing setting now let's open up the program to install the program you install like you normally would on any of your computers for the ipad and for windows machines it comes from the appropriate stores for the mac interestingly enough it comes directly from the website and you install it using a standard mac installation procedure but as soon as you install it you'll see there's something different about this program many programs have a get started button when you first start up the program shaper 3d does this perhaps better than any i've ever seen because it uses little videos to help you learn how to use the program i'll show you just a couple clicks to get the idea and then we'll go to using the program directly so i'm going to click on get started and ask me if i'm using a trackpad or a mouse a mouse let's learn the basics to move the camera right click and drag the mouse now after each little video plays and that was an example you can try the individual activities now i'm going to exit the program come back in so we can show you how to use the program give you an introduction to its use by actually modeling something and then we'll talk about whether i'm willing to spend four cups of coffee at starbucks each month about 20 bucks or so in order to use a paid program versus a freed program okay i'm back and i've learned something new and that is that if you exit shaper 3d in the middle of the tutorial and you re-enter it really wants you to continue i couldn't find a way around that i clicked through the tutorial there may be around way around that but then it left me off at this screen now for some reason you're not at this screen it's not going to matter because we're going to start at the home screen to get to the home screen click on the home and you'll see there are three entries across the top the entries are discover design and learn discover will show you some of your recent designs and it'll show you some very new tutorials and webinars designs will show you all of your designs and learn will show you tutorials what they call workflows which are really customer interviews stories which are also customer testimonials more or less the manual which comes up in a browser and the ability to go to a discussion forum which gives you recent information and is relatively active now to get back to your designs you click on designs and i'm going to click on this unnamed design which was the one i was on when i left now before i get started with anything else let me show you some key features you need to know to even get started you can open and close the sidebar with this button up here and that will show you all of the objects the bodies and sketches in your diagram we'll look at that in a minute if you have the business edition you can create drawings from your parts these are two-dimensional plans those will be listed here i do not have that edition over on the right-hand side you'll see a navigation cube which you can click on to change to different views and if you double click on that navigation view it will take the origin put it back in the center of your screen if you click on this element here you can switch we're going to switch to millimeters why because we're designing a three-dimensional part we're designing a little box of a lid that i'm going to print on a 3d printer and therefore millimeters is the more natural unit of measure for most not all but for most 3d printers the horseshoe next to it the magnet i guess is really what it is we'll turn on or off snapping we're going to leave it all on on and then i'm going to click in my general area to get out of that element and then this next element is for cross sections we're not going to use that today i have a mouse that i'm using here it has a scroll wheel if i scroll on the scroll wheel i can zoom in or out if i press on the scroll wheel and drag i can move things around and if i hold the shift key down and use the right mouse button i can take and rotate once again i can always click on the corner of this cube to recenter everything now i want to sketch something on this plane remember this is x y and z we're going to sketch on this surface right here so if sketch is not active you'll know it's not active because there's an icon here that says sketch i can click once here then hit the spacebar and that will center that plane it by default puts me in the line tool i'm going to switch to the rectangle tool and when drawing a rectangle you can do it centered around a point diagonal or three points we're going to say diagonal i'm going to move my mouse so it hovers over the origin and click once do not click and hold in this tool you click once and then going to drag out my rectangle click once again now i'm going to want to make this much bigger than we'll fit on the screen so i'm going to zoom in a bit here and then i'm going to click on this dimension here and i can use my mouse or a pen if i'm or a pencil if i'm using something like the pen on my surface go or the pencil on the apple ipad but instead i'm actually going to click c and then use the keypad and i want to make this 150 millimeters wide now you'll see it's now too big to fit on the surface so i can use my scroll bar to scroll back in then press on the scroll wheel i'm sorry i said scroll bar should be scroll wheel and center that again now i'm going to click on one of these sides and double click on the whoops and then click on the dimension and i'm going to make this 80 tall so i've now dimensioned this box at various times you'll see that there are little pop-ups for little videos that it will play for you that will give you additional hints overall so far i'd say this user interface is the easiest i've used it's very clean it's easy to use and they have lots of built-in help now i can also constrain my elements so i want to make sure that this stays nice and square so i can click on this individual edge and i can say make that horizontal i could click on this edge and say make it vertical and i can do that to the rest of my edges and as simple as that i've added constraints now if i zoom in here you'll see these little icons here which indicate there's a constraint that's very much like parametric modeling now how do i center this around the origin because i want this to sort of stay in one place there is no constraint that will make two points co-linear or coincident but if you take a point like this corner here and you just drag it to another point when you see those red x's around it let me drag that off and zoom in here so you'll be able to see that a little better when you take and you drag it to the origin see how it goes red that means it's now connected and you could then click on this little lock and that's not going to move now so now if i try to change this i can't change it in essence in terms of parametric modeling it would be called fully constrained why because i have dimensions on both axes i have horizontal and vertical constraints and it's locked to a point now when i'm done with that i can take and close this sketch but i don't really see what i'm looking i don't see here the option to make this three-dimensional but if i double-click on the cube and go back into 3d view and then click on a surface i'll see i have a bunch of different things i can do one of the things i can do is extrude and i do that by pushing or pulling so we're going to make this let's say we're going to make this 60 high and i've now created a box now that box is a body over here if i hide the body the sketch is still underneath now if this was a parametric modeling system i could change the sketch so as an example if i click on this once and then hit the space bar it will center the sketch on the screen for me i can change this 150 let's say to 180 that looks good close the sketch double click on my navigation element to go back to 3d view and now i'm going to unhide the body and the body didn't change that's because this is not a parametric modeling system sketches are more or less like templates used to create bodies but once you create them they can be used to create another body but they don't live with the body if i want to change this i click on a surface and i manipulate it directly to pull it in and out i don't use the sketch to manipulate it so that's one of the differences between this and let's say fusion 360 or freecad that are parametric modeling programs there are advantages and disadvantages to both but that's a clear distinction okay now i'm going to actually take and delete this body now for my design i want there to be two sets of walls an inner wall and an outer wall with what i mean by that in a minute so i'm going to click on this sketch but i'm not going to extrude it i'm going to hit the bar now you'll see when you first enter sketch by default line is selected we don't want line we want offset edge offset edge is a tool that will create another edge around the outside of a current sketch or element we want it set to loop that means we want to create it all the way around so i'm going to click on this edge and then click on this box and put in two millimeters now i'm going to click outside of that area and you'll see we have an inner box line and an outer line i want to do that one more time offset edge click two millimeters and now we have three lines so i'm going to go and close the sketch double click on my cube which will take me to 3d view okay so now i can take and extrude the inner surface this one here i can extrude this wall let me zoom in a little to make it easier to see i could extrude this wall or this wall so the first thing i'm going to do is create a bottom to my box now there are a couple ways i could do this i'm going to do it this way just to demonstrate extrusion a bit more so i'm going to select this area i'm going to hold shift and select this area hold shift and select this area so i've now selected three areas and i'm going to move that up and i'm gonna click in this box here and make the bottom of this box two millimeters now that's great but now i can't see the walls anymore so how do i extrude the walls well i'm gonna go over here and i'm gonna hide this body now i can see the underlying sketch now remember the sketch is not attached to the object but i can use it to do additional construction okay now i'm going to zoom in a little bit select this inner area here i'm going to extrude it i'm going to extrude it up and let's make that 60 millimeters now i want the inside to be taller than the outside so the lid can fit over the top so i'm going to select this area i'm going to extrude it up and i'm going to make this 58 millimeters now when i zoom in and use my scroll wheel to move back to the center we can see we have our box we have the outside edge and the inside edge and let's zoom in a little here and you can see a little better what happened to the bottom well just had i would hid that so i'm going to unhide that and now we can see we have the box fully formed the way we want it now as i do other things with this box it's going to be awkward if these pieces are become disconnected so i'm going to select all three of these and i'm going to create a union done so now i have the box as a single body now we're ready to create a lid so we need to refresh our mind's eye of what the dimensions are here so i'm going to take and go over to the box here and click on the eye to hide it and then i'm going to click on one of these edges here and we can see that the dimension is 150 but that dimension is to the inside and remember we added 2 and 2 so that would be 154 but there are two sides so it'd be 158 and the other side was 80 so that would be 80 plus 4 times 2 is 88. so we need to make the lid 158 by 88 and we'll just take and center this on the screen and i'm just going to create the lid over here next to it so we need a rectangle and we're going to make it let's say 188 by i'm sorry 158 by 88 so let's just get close and then we'll click in here so that's 158 by let's click on this one we'll zoom in a little here so that we can get to that by 88 and that's the outside dimension so that's going to be the lip that comes down on the outside the inside dimension is the 80 by 150. so likewise we need to have three lines here to create the different extrusions so we know how to do that because we've done that before so i'm going to go and go to offset make sure it's in loop mode let's go inside by minus two oops minus two click out let's click this one make sure we're an offset edge go inside by minus two minus two again and now we have the sketch we need for our lid so let's actually take and create the lid we're going to close the sketch double click on the navigation icon on the cube if we want we can turn this on now i'm going to zoom in first to make it easier to select things so i want to select this surface hold shift down and select this surface and this surface and we're going to extrude it up let's make the lid two millimeters thick so that would fit over the top fit over like this but remember we wanted to come down around the outside so it snaps on there so let's take and hide this body and now we're going to take this little edge here and we're going to extrude it further than the actual interface so we have to select that there and we're going to extrude this 4 millimeters so we have the inside extruded 2 and the outside extruded 4. now we can turn this back on now it's a little bit hard to see so i'm going to zoom in here and you can see the details now as i rotate it around that we have a lip around the outside and that lip is going to fit into this lip here now i'm going to click on the lid and i'm going to rotate it 180 degrees so it's in the proper orientation in order to sit on top here now i could just move it over there now with the move command but there's an even more powerful way to do that i'm going to zoom in a little bit and i'm in a position so i can see the lip here see this lip right here i'm going to go to transform align i'm going to click on that lip right there and then i'm going to hold shift down and navigate up and click on that edge right there i'm going to click done and if i move this over here now and rotate it around we'll see our box is now covered the lid is on the box now let's show you how you can see that that's really working i'm going to turn the sketch off we won't need it anymore and move this over here a little bit rotate it around i'm going to click on the lid again and i'm going to click on move rotate so i want to take and move the rotation by dragging this little circle here to where the hinge would be now let me move the orientation a little bit so you can see this and now if i rotate it you can see that the box is actually precisely rotating on my lid right there so let's click on the lid again ensure that the rotation point is snapped to right down there and we can now open and close our box so we've created a box with a lid that's properly aligned now in a program like freecad you'd have to use a extra workbench which is an assembly workbench the assembly two plus workbench works similar to what we just did here but this was actually relatively easy to do as long as you change how you think about cad you don't re-manipulate sketches now how do i save this well if i want to 3d print this i just go to file export 3d print next i'm going to export it as an stl i'm going to give it a name box and lid i'm not going to include mesh bodies because i didn't import any mesh bodies but i'm going to save each first level item as a separate stl file that means i'll get a lid stl file and a box xcl file i go to next and now i can click on export click on save and i've now saved this model to my desktop so what are my thoughts if you come from a cad background a program like free cad will be very intuitive to you it will come naturally to you and in fact free cad does things this program can't do as an example this program really doesn't support type there's a workaround but if i wanted to put type a name on the outside of this box it's a little tricky to do in this program it's a little easier to do in let's say fusion 360 or tinkercad or freecad this program doesn't have today add-ons for sheet metal processing or for elaborate curves you can do things with revolves and with lofts and with splines but it's not as feature rich as a program like fusion 360 or free cat but it is remarkably easy to use so i thought is that for many people if they want to model a handful of things a month you know you make the decision but is it worth 20 bucks which is maybe four cups of starbucks coffee because my conclusion is it has met the goal of being the easiest computer-aided design program i've looked at in the last three years that's not to say it doesn't have a learning curve but it is a remarkable beautiful aesthetically pleasing piece of software well folks i hope this was useful if you want to learn about a lot of other cad programs there are a whole bunch of videos on the channel and there are links in the description to a playlist with all of those videos thanks so much for watching if you learned something give me a thumbs up recommend channel other people subscribe to the channel and go to forum.makewithtech.com if you want to discuss this in other videos have a great day and let's continue to learn things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 8,427

Keywords: 3d design, 3d modeling, 3d design for beginners, shapr3d, cad tutorial, design 3d, 3d cad, shapr3d video, computer aided design, 3d printing, best 3d cad, 3d model, product design, 3d design for 3d printing, freecad, tinkercad, openscad, shapr3d beginners, fusion 360, fusion 360 alternatives, 3d modeling for 3d printing, 3d printers, best 3d software for beginners, freecad tutorials for beginners, best cad software for beginners, shapr3d tutorials, shapr3d tutorial

Id: lbY4280RcNA

Length: 29min 46sec (1786 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021