3D modeling on an iPad for concept development?

motion guru · Mar 31, 2018

Well I have lost the use of my right arm for the next 6 to 8 weeks or so. My arm is in an immobilizing sling with a repair to an acute rotator cuff tear and cut / bicep tendon release. Hurts more than I thought it would, and really no ability to use a mouse or type for several more weeks. Thank goodness for Siri and voice to text.

I’m going to have a couple of weeks of downtime and want to do some value engineering on a few of our standard machine designs.

My hope is that I can model up ideas and easily pitch them to my Mechanical Engineering team and having some back-and-forth design reviews.

Anyone with experience with a simple 3D CAD package that will work on an iPad Pro?

PmGRacer · Mar 31, 2018

motion guru said:
Well I have lost the use of my right arm for the next 6 to 8 weeks or so. My arm is in an immobilizing sling with a repair to an acute rotator cuff tear and cut / bicep tendon release. Hurts more than I thought it would, and really no ability to use a mouse or type for several more weeks. Thank goodness for Siri and voice to text.

I’m going to have a couple of weeks of downtime and want to do some value engineering on a few of our standard machine designs.

My hope is that I can model up ideas and easily pitch them to my Mechanical Engineering team and having some back-and-forth design reviews.

Anyone with experience with a simple 3D CAD package that will work on an iPad Pro?

Just doing a quick search brings up Onshape 3D app. Looks like the only app that allows design on an iPad Pro with the air pen. The Autodesk products allow you to look at and interact with existing models but not create them in iOS on a iPad.

Machine on!

Miguels244 · Mar 31, 2018

Geeze...hope you heal up well.
My experience has been less than stellar with doing things like that on an iPad...let me ask my kid.

motion guru · Mar 31, 2018

Yeah, I saw that . . . was hoping to hear from a few folks who have used it or anything similar. Mostly looking for something to convey ideas with easily using one hand.

Hey Miguel’s, seems like kids are more adept at this kind of thing. I am more of a SolidWorks guy and never realized how much I used the mouse / buttons / keyboard.

Miguels244 · Mar 31, 2018

Kiddo says you are probably out of luck.
He says that not only is the platform not built for it, but the UI design just doesn’t make sense on a tablet.

I’m an old solid works guy myself...from ‘98
Even better, I learned Autocad on 10.

motion guru · Mar 31, 2018

Started with ACAD release 9 myself in 1988 . . . even tried 3D with it in the early 90’s with some patent drawings :crazy:

US525613A - Tunnel boring machine with continuous forward propulsion
- Google Patents

This was a machine designed to bore in squeezing ground conditions near Waxahatchee Texas for the super collider project that congress cancelled in the mid-90’s.

Miguels244 · Mar 31, 2018

motion guru said:
Started with ACAD release 9 myself in 1988 . . . even tried 3D with it in the early 90’s with some patent drawings

US525613A - Tunnel boring machine with continuous forward propulsion
- Google Patents

This was a machine designed to bore in squeezing ground conditions near Waxahatchee Texas for the super collider project that congress cancelled in the mid-90’s.

I came in when we were setting up acad 10.
How may floppies was that? I’ve forgotten.

My early work was civil engineering...paid the bills.
Drainage is interesting.

Oh god the transition to 13...
Funny how you can actually hear an old operator from the command line typing.

nerdyrcdriver · Mar 31, 2018

Miguels244 said:
Oh god the transition to 13...
Funny how you can actually hear an old operator from the command line typing.

My biggest gripe about using Inventor (autodesk) is that they didn't carry the command line in from AutoCAD into Inventor. So many commands overlap but you have to go and click the button at the top. Even as someone who learned on AutoCAD 2012 and Inventor 2013. My hat goes off to anyone skilled at manual drafting and part layout.

Miguel's kid speaks the truth when saying that the ipad just isn't set up for CAD work. MAYBE if there was a way to connect a 3D mouse and speech to text for dimension input, but that doesn't help your situation at all. In a pinch I have used an android tablet (with bluetooth mouse and keyboard) to remote into a CAD workstation and use Solidworks, but it was far from ideal.

You could try programs like tinkercad or google sketchup in the hopes that they are less mouse/keyboard intensive. Even with both hands/arms completely functional, your experience will either be pleasant or infuriating trying to use a different cad program than you are custom to. I can do some pretty complex stuff in both Inventor and Solidworks, but I am absolutely useless with Tinkercad.

PmGRacer · Mar 31, 2018

I started on Acad 10 many moons ago. Back in ‘86 my drafting teacher had an Apple with some sort of rudimentary cad program. We had to do a project on it. I remember thinking it was easier to draw it on paper than use that stupid system![emoji12] 32 years later I have been using Autodesk Inventor Pro for 6 years and wonder how I ever did anything without it! I still use my drafting skills for part layout but design is all done in 3D. One of best features of Inventor or Solidworks is the ability for the software to generate the 2D prints from the model.

I am not a designer by trade but do design work all the time for personal projects and occasionally at work when designing and building fixtures. I use a Dell Precision M6300 laptop with Autodesk Inventor Pro 2016 loaded. I know once model generated in a 3D program iOS/Android apps can view and interact with the models but not natively generate them.

Machine on!

Comatose · Mar 31, 2018

Your time is valuable, and 6-8 weeks is not a small chunk of it. Just get a Surface and use your regular windows programs with a pen.

implmex · Mar 31, 2018

Hi Motion Guru:
I have a Surface Pro IV and have tried to use it for Solidworks.
No joy.
Something about the Windows 10 OS and the way it works on the Surface makes it almost impossible to use SWorks; the icons are all goobered up and overlapping and it's painful to work with.
I have something of the same problem trying to use Quickbooks on it.
It may be nothing more than a setting I haven't found yet, but I've found similar complaints from others when I Googled for a solution.

However, there is a piece of software that comes with the Surface Pro that allows you to do sketches with the pen and save them as JPG files that I find very useful for concept designs and the like.
It's Autodesk Sketchbook.
You can use it with one hand, drawing the old fashioned way directly on the screen and then sending the output onto your network.
Since you've described your ambition as doing concept engineering only, you may find this is more than adequate to communicate your design intent and you can do it all without keyboard or mouse.
Of course, you'll have to re-activate your inner artist but that's part of the fun!

Cheers

Marcus
Implant Mechanix • Design & Innovation > HOME
Vancouver Wire EDM -- Wire EDM Machining

Miguels244 · Mar 31, 2018

1964...sketch oad
It gets pertinent at 4 mons

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=USyoT_Ha_bA

motion guru · Mar 31, 2018

implmex said:
Hi Motion Guru:
I have a Surface Pro IV and have tried to use it for Solidworks.
No joy.
Something about the Windows 10 OS and the way it works on the Surface makes it almost impossible to use SWorks; the icons are all goobered up and overlapping and it's painful to work with.
I have something of the same problem trying to use Quickbooks on it.
It may be nothing more than a setting I haven't found yet, but I've found similar complaints from others when I Googled for a solution.

However, there is a piece of software that comes with the Surface Pro that allows you to do sketches with the pen and save them as JPG files that I find very useful for concept designs and the like.
It's Autodesk Sketchbook.
You can use it with one hand, drawing the old fashioned way directly on the screen and then sending the output onto your network.
Since you've described your ambition as doing concept engineering only, you may find this is more than adequate to communicate your design intent and you can do it all without keyboard or mouse.
Of course, you'll have to re-activate your inner artist but that's part of the fun!

Cheers

Marcus
Implant Mechanix • Design & Innovation > HOME
Vancouver Wire EDM -- Wire EDM Machining

Thanks Marcus,

My son picked up an Apple Pencil for me tonight and will swing it by the house tomorrow and I’ll give a couple of iPad apps a test drive. I’ll report back the good, the bad, and the ugly. Need to be able to go more than 6 hours without a Percocet before I am likely to be useful anyway.

JST · Apr 1, 2018

When you want to get away from the mouse, is that because you do not like using it with you non-dominant left arm? It seems as if it would be no more clumsy than trying to sketch. You may be more ambidextrous than I am......

PmGRacer said:
I....

I am not a designer by trade but do design work all the time for personal projects and occasionally at work when designing and building fixtures. I use a Dell Precision M6300 laptop with Autodesk Inventor Pro 2016 loaded....

I have found the M6300 to be almost ideal..... I use mine (am now using the reserve one, the original one croaked) with Alibre Design Expert 2017 on Win7, along with Keyshot. With only two cores, Keyshot is slow, but Alibre is pretty fast.

Did you load it up to 8GB with the special memory that takes? I am using 4GB, mostly because that 8GB is expensive enough that I'd be well in my way to a new computer.

Sorry for hijack.

powerglider · Apr 1, 2018

I use shaper 3D and Onshape on my iPad Pro. It’s not inventor but for simple idea sharing very effective so long as you don’t need to show movement.

I also use a keyboard called my script stylus and this works very well with the pencil. Instead if tapping on keyboard you write as you did with a pencil in school And the iPad writes it in type.

bryan_machine · Apr 2, 2018

SW18 has a "pen/touch" feature, which they tell me only works on Win10 with a particular update set (creators's update)?

Anyway, hawk ridge (reseller) folks sent me an email with some machines that actually work with this combo.

218 What's New in SOLIDWORKS - Pen, Touch, and Gesture-based Sketching

And the machines that are certified (pretty spendy)
1. brand new HP Zbook X2
2. Lenovo yoga p40 which is now discontinued
3. Wacom mobilestudio pro

They didn't certify the surface books.

One suspects that latest Yoga and XPS (dell) machines might work - but it's an expensive experiment.

But 8 weeks is a long time, and it'd be a generally useful machine afterwards.

Miguels244 · Apr 2, 2018

motion guru said:
Thanks Marcus,

My son picked up an Apple Pencil for me tonight and will swing it by the house tomorrow and I’ll give a couple of iPad apps a test drive. I’ll report back the good, the bad, and the ugly. Need to be able to go more than 6 hours without a Percocet before I am likely to be useful anyway.

Careful with the opioids.

jmead · Apr 2, 2018

Good luck with the recovery and rehab Guru.
I believe nerves in the shoulder can scream the loudest of all.

Regards,
John

3D modeling on an iPad for concept development?

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