Feedback & suggestions, Shapediver, appbuilder and Shopify integration

Grasshopper ShapeDiver
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As a soon 12 month user and soon to be a launched site with Shapediver i have gathered some feedback and suggestions on Shapediver :slight_smile: An amazing software overall!

Allow empty inputs in the app/app builder - I work mostly with millimeters between 0 - up to 12 000mm, and mostly with slider inputs (The customer can see the limitations with the slider) and customers will mostly use the number input field due to the large numbers. And I want it to be mobile friendly which the app builder is, but when you erase the preset numbers in the input field a 0 turns up. And when you put in a wanted number like 2500 that 0 adds on so you put in 25 000 instead if you are not awake as customer. Solution would be to allow it to be empty and adress a warning or something instead. I haven’t seen this problem testing the products in Shapediver, only app builder.

Desktop connection to GH/If not possible change the GH file and keep the ticket - As adressed in this thread: Updating a model? . We will start with around 10-20 products and growing from there with Shapediver hopefully, now when Shapediver is taking a real step into ecommerce with own integrations this should be prioritized. This is not so big issue when having 1-2 iframed configurators on a website, but with 10-1000 products integrated to Shopify/Woo this becomes a real big issue not be able to make small changes to the models without having to reupload an updated model and change tickets. You loose cache and its a big workload and it opens up for mistakes.

Make inputs and outputs specially for pricing in GH to clear cache - With the existing shopify integration you use the Shapediver Direct Data Output to send the calculated price to the integration/Shopify, I dont know how the new integration will work, if its something like the existing new outputs/inputs should be made for pricing only that lets you clear the cache on the price only and keep valueble geometry/input cache.

1 Like
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I think you have hit the nail on the head there. Here are our biggest issues we have/had:

  1. Updating the model - like the previous poster, updating a model means uploading a completely new model with new front end and back end embed codes. We have to keep a whole Airtable database just for the model updates and in the end someone has to manually copy the new code into the settings on Shopify, which is always a bit scary. What we need is updating of a version of a script with version history for easy rollbacks! Like I mentioned somewhere else, we have literally hundreds of models on Shapediver, which are all just iterations of the same thing. Imagine you had to create a new Github repository every time you make a change… that’s what it feels like.

  2. Price and custom products - updating or setting the price is the most important function in the connection between Shapediver and Shopify. Shopify doesn’t really support custom price products, so I also blame Shopify for this, but it’s kind of the only reason to have this plugin. It basically creates a new product on the fly when you add a custom product to the cart. It still feels kind of hacky though.

  3. I think by far the most annoying part of all this was setting up the viewer and materials, because you don’t get a preview in Rhino. You basically end up creating a model where you can adjust everything around the textures, then upload to Shapediver, adjust all the values, make a note of them and then hardcode them in the Grasshopper model. Since we are usually trying to represent real products and want the rendering in the viewer to be as good as possible, this step really needs to be much easier. Good textures and values make all the difference and it’s just so hard if you want to change anything. Also all the textures need to be on S3 or something similar and it would be nice if we could just upload them to Shapediver and it finds them from there.

I’ll update this if more things come to mind.

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On your second point about Shopify, maybe someone at shapediver could fill in here about the coming integration? :slight_smile: The existing integration, as you say Armim, creates a new product for each configuration that is being put in the basket as a kind of ”saved state” so you can go back and continue the configuration, but it makes a mess of the products in your shopify dash. It may have to be like that for some things to work, i dont know? But i can imagine having some good trafic and alot of products it is impossible to navigate your products in the Shopify dashboard. What I can read about the upcoming integration with app builder the app you create in shapediver will popup as an overlay on your productpage and you can add it to cart/basket, but is the ”saved states” stored in shopify like it is now or somewhere else?

On the first point we agree

About textures, for me it works great as it is. But I work with big products with wood, concrete and steel. From the perspective point it looks really good and life like, if you zoom in on my textures to like 10-20cm away there will be pixels. I could probably update the textures in size now to get rid of some pixels on extreme zoom. My problem with textures was the mapping tho, but thats how Rhino works. I havent worked with a CAD software earlier that smoothers out textures like Rhino does, Revit and archicad for example atleast keeps the texture ratio

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Thank you for your valuable feedback and suggestions regarding ShapeDiver’s AppBuilder and Shopify integration! We truly appreciate the time you’ve taken to share your thoughts and ideas. Let me address the points you both raised:

1. Input Issue:

We’ve already filed a task to address the input issue you mentioned, and our team will begin working on this improvement starting next week. We aim to resolve this as quickly and effectively as possible. Your input helps us refine the experience, and we’ll keep you updated on our progress.

2. Versioning:

Versioning is a key focus for us in the coming year, and we fully understand its importance to your workflow. Our goal is to provide a robust versioning system that includes features like rolling back to previous versions, selecting an active version, and more.

Note that, within our Shopify integration, a simple versioning mechanism is already possible. Since you can reference models by their url, you could just edit the url of your previous model and set the previous url to the new model you uploaded.

However, it’s important to note that while the user experience will treat these as versions of the same model, each version will still be a new entity in the system. This means the cache for each version will be separate. We’re working to make this as seamless as possible and look forward to sharing updates as the system evolves.

Additionally, the issues you mentioned, such as copying materials and rendering settings, will be addressed as part of the broader versioning improvements.

3. Shopify Integration and Pricing:

The new integration will maintain a similar approach to pricing—you will be able to use a data output to send the price dynamically to Shopify. In fact, the ShapeDiver plugin for Grasshopper already includes a new “Add To Cart” action button, which allows to send a specific configuration to a Shopify cart.

We understand your concerns about caching, especially for applications requiring real-time updates like pricing. While it’s not currently possible to clear the cache for a single output without affecting the entire computation, we’re actively working on a feature to disable caching entirely for such use cases (by means of specific grasshopper components). This will provide more flexibility and reliability for Shopify applications and similar integrations.

For more information about the new Shopify integration and related topics, we invite you and everyone interested to our community catchup on january 21st, where we will present the new integration in more detail and answer all of your questions. Join here!

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Thank you for your reply, here is the allow empty input issue i have. This is only a problem in the app builder, a 0 pops up when you delete all the preset inputs.

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The Shapediver plugin was updated last week and the Shopify integration is live on Shopify, perfect news :slight_smile:

I have tested it alot this weekend, but I have som questions:

Docs and help with the new modules in Rhino - Maybe you can share a GH definition with examples how to work with the “Addtocart Action” and the other functions released? Would be nice to se how thing work, like:

  • Image/Screenshot (Cant make it work, and dont know how)
  • Model state/saved state (How to make it work and how it works), I made an test order in my shop, no model state was included? And you cant go back and change you model from the cart. Maybe i am missing something? This is a big deal to be able to launch, so more info about that would be lovely.
  • Will it be possible to show some inputs in the cart?
  • There is a closeconfigurator option i GH, it looks nice and works great. But there is also a built in close button in the shopify integration, so if you add the close button i your GH script and have the hamburger menu open in the app in Shopify you end up have 3 close buttons (Close menu, close app (GH) and built in close app button).

Appbuilder, theme override and fonts - It would be nice to be able to use Google fonts, but as I can read about fonts in the Mantine docs there is no list of avaible fonts. And to use google fonts an installation has to be done somewhere.

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The official Shopify plugin was made public accidentally, we have unlisted it again for the time being. I encourage you to come to our community catchup next week (January 21st), where we will present the new plugin and answer all questions you have!

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I be there :slight_smile: