Hi All,

I just wanted to post about Shapr3D. In spite of numerous flaws, I have to admit that I have been able to do more with this app than any other 3D modeling/CAD program.

There is a free tier, which gives you all available tools. The catch is that export resolution is quite limited. So are the available export file formats. However, STL is available for free, and for my model, the 'low resolution' export was actually good enough for prototyping/printing.

There is a two week free trial of the full version. So you can model in the free version, and then start your trial to get full resolution export in more file formats.

The killer though, is that the subscription price is not really affordable for me - $300 per year. There is also no 'ala carte' purchase of high resolution models. I don't model nearly often enough to justify $300 a year, so I'll be stuck with the free/low res version.

To highlight my main point though - this this really works. I didn't get into either Fusion 360 or OnShape due to their various crappy policies and high prices... but of the things I've used, this one is the best.

There is another recently released app that is promising... Plasticity. Plasticity is going to be in the same ballpark as Shapr3D one day, but it's not there yet. Additionally, the way you do things is designed for Blender users - which is great for them, but never made sense to me at all.

On the plus side for Plasticity, you can actually just buy the app - not subscribe to something. In addition, it's cheaper - currently $100 to buy the software. It's version 1.0 at the moment, and it does show. I'd say there's a lot more learning needed for Plasticity... but maybe not if you're a Blender user.

It's a pretty cool time for CAD software, even if they still haven't reached the ease of use I imagine in my dreams .

Go check 'em out.

Stan

Sorry, just testing, nothing to see here .

Hi All,

The site upgrade is now complete.

Please let us know if you have any issues using the forum.

Thanks,
Admin

Hi All,

This weekend, I will be taking the forums offline in order to update the software.

I expect this to take at least a day, and there my be issues afterwards. If you experience any trouble logging in or viewing the site, please send an email to fabric8rsite@fabric8r.com.

Please bear with us.

Admin

Hi All,

Our hosting provider had a hardware failure that I think resulted in the site being moved, or possibly restored from backup.

At any rate, they managed to not restore portions of the theme for the site - namely the stylesheets.

Beyond that, the site seems quite slow. I'm not too happy about this, but I do not currently have time to deal with it.

I hope to get some of the issues resolved late next week.

If you see this message, I admire your persistence .

Admin

Hi All,

Two things: Email update, and Member List changes.

The site email issues have generally been resolved. Registration and activation emails are now working as expected.

However, you will no longer be able to send email directly to another forum user.

We have switched away from using a gmail account as our email address - they make it so difficult these days that we had to move on.

The old email address was fabric8rsite@gmail.com. You will no longer see emails from this address.

The new email address is: fabric8r@fabric8r.com

If you need to contact us, please use the new address - although I do not yet have automatic notification on this account, so any mail might take a while to reach me.

Member List: I have disabled the Member List functionality in the forum. This is in part because you can no longer look up a member and send them an email due to the email server configuration. I'm sure I haven't prevented this entirely, but it won't work in any case.

If you have any feedback on these changes, please post in the forum.

Administrator

Hi All,

Our outdated email setup has finally gone belly up, and the site is not successfully sending any emails at the moment, including activation emails.

I will not be able to work on this for a few hours, but I hope to get the issue resolved this evening.

Thank you for your patience.

Admin

Hey All,

I just wanted to mention CADQuery (or CadQuery...). It's like OpenSCAD, in that you program your objects, but seems to have a much nicer and more powerful API and feature set than OpenSCAD.

I haven't used it for anything yet, but I did spend a while reading the documentation, and I think you may find it a lot easier than OpenSCAD to get what you want.

Check it out:

https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery

Stan

Hi All,

Well, it took a year after the suggestion was made, but we now have a CNC Routing section (under Miscellaneous).

When I set up the forums originally, I had thought that CNC interests were covered better elsewhere (and indeed they are) - but I failed to realize that users of this forum might want to share here as well.

Enjoy the new forum!

Admin

Hello,

There was a period of time where I accidentally was not monitoring the email account that handles sending email from this site.

During that time, it appears that some emails have been sent from this site that should not have been allowed. I don't know yet exactly what the issues are, but I am trying to remedy the problem.

As of now, there are zero email addresses in the fabric8r.com domain. Anything claiming to come from someone@fabric8r.com is absolutely spam, and should be deleted immediately. Normally, I would say mark it as spam - but they're using my domain name, so I may take a hit. Well - I just have to fix it asap.

On the plus side, even though it's been happening for a while, so far I'm only aware of about six emails. Too many, but not really that many.

I do what I can to prevent this kind of thing from happening, and I apologize to whoever has received these emails.

I will post an update when I learn more.

Admin