Hello,

Thank you for your suggestions.

You are right for the shortcuts. I really need to put them somewhere easily accessible. I myself pretty much only use them instead of clicking the buttons. It's so much faster!

Regarding a photo mode, a few months ago, I made some experiments with a ray tracing renderer as I also liked this idea. However I didn't think that it was good enough to be implemented yet. See https://twitter.com/Mecabricks/status/462832246001385472
I keep that in the to do list anyway and I might try something else too.

For missing parts, there was originally a form in the previous version of the workshop (v2.0) which I replaced by the new v3.0 a few weeks ago. However, I didn't reactivate this form as I didn't manage to keep track of everything that was asked for. It wasn't easy to handle on my side. I guess an idea would be to open a dedicated topic in the forum for now.

However, if you know about 3D modeling, you are more than welcome to model the parts you would like to get. I currently model the parts in Blender and then export them to a json format that Three.js (the WebGL framework used by mecabricks) can read. I will try to post a short tutorial with the few rules I follow when modeling parts.

Hope it helps.

P.S: I'm overseas in holidays until the end of august so I won't probably have the time to update the workshop too much but I'll definitely try to answer in the forum or add parts to the library if I'm provided with the 3D files.

I'm not sure if you saw my post in the Community forum, but I would really enjoy helping out. I have done 3D modeling and some coding. I understand its a huge task to keep up with everything and would really like to help. The 4 kits that I've started, 2 published, have missing parts. I'm comfortable modeling them, so long as you have quality guidelines to follow so everyone's parts aren't messed up.

Thanks for your reply.
I also use the shortcuts but I had to "trial and error" to discover them.

For the problem with the missing parts, I think it would be a good idea to collect them (in the forum, a checklist or something like that). So everybody could see and add missing parts. Then the community would have the oportunity to create them. Maybe there are a couple of guys out there with enough experience in 3D modeling to add the parts from the checklist. I just have some knowledge in Maya and 3ds Max and I think a tutorial and some guidlines would help others (and myself) to create the missing parts they want to get.

Besides, if you are planing to translate the website and the workshop in another language I would appreciate it, when I could translate it in German (my native language). If you are interested, just tell me. I think there are a lot of people in Germany, who would love to create something in the workshop but find it to hard to do it with English controls and lose there interest when they see, that there is no German version.

Enjoy your holidays, your wedding (whenever your big day is) and your honeymoon.

I like the idea of a checklist. I could help maintain an updated Google doc checklist with a forum post dedicated to user submitted parts. Scrubs, of you allowed 2 or 3 competent folks to work as a quality assurance on the parts, it would alleviate some pressure off of you to check every singe part.

All that sounds really good.

I posted a list of keyboard shortcuts in the "Help and Tips" section of the forum.

To keep track of missing parts, the idea of d.schultz sounds good.
Modeling parts (+drawing decorations) is a very time consuming process and having more than 1 person working on it would be a good improvement to mecabricks. For now, I mainly model parts I'm missing when I want to build a model in the workshop so it can be pretty random 😃

Regarding translation, it would be easy to add another language. I can provide the language files. For now I also maintain the parts library in french and english but I guess that it would be ok to simply load the english part names for other languages.

Wedding is next saturday so it's coming soon soon...

Thanks guys

What resources and programs do you use for decorations, like stickers? I had a few thoughts on that topic.

There are obviously some decorations that are stickers, and some that are printed on. For the pieces that have sticker, would it be worth creating a file that could be "applied" like a sticker rather than creating special parts. This would allow people to apply that sticker to custom projects as well.

When it comes to part that have the prints on the piece, its a no brainer that those should be modeled with the graphic on them.

To take it a step further, it would be great to have the option to print the stickers for the particular model you're building.

Maybe I could be a help regarding the language file as I could translate it to german.

I am a SolidWorks user as well. Could this be of any help for modeling parts?

Zanna did an italian translation for the website interface and I'm yet to add it (I need to update the website code so that part names and categories are loaded in english for other languages than french). But yes, new languages are always welcome.

I also spend a good part of my day at work on solidworks but I actually don't use it home for part modelling. However I don't see any reason why you cannot do it as long as it is exported in a format I can read with Blender (.stl) and follows the few rules from this post.