Is there a way to do this linked model replacement yet? This is quite a real productivity issue and many other types of software allow for this replacement of linked objects for very good reason. As mentioned above, Adoble products do this, also Solidworks, AutoCAD, Inventor, and I'm sure many other professional software packages offer this basic productivity feature.
In my case, I bought simplify3D because I make my living by doing CAD design and prototyping for professional clients, so this very much cuts into productivity.
Could I just record the coordinates and reenter them? Not feasible. It's actually quite a bit easier but still a time consuming effort just to rebuild the whole thing, as in my current case I have a model separated into 4 parts then duplicated 10 times for a multiple print. It would take much more than a few minutes to manually record/replace the coordinates and scale (yes also scaled).
So I'm really hoping this old thread is just out of date and this is a feature by now, please?
Welcome to the Simplify3D forum. This is not a feature in Simplify3D at this time. I do have some additional questions before before I log this feature request with our development team.
How would you like for something like this to work? My first thought would be that the software would look for changes to the model file that you've imported and offer to update the model if a change is detected. However, I can see some situations where more of a manual replacement might also be desired, such as the same model being updated and then saved with iterative filenames rather than replacing the existing model.
Thanks,
"A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song."
S3D-Jake wrote: ↑Wed Aug 22, 2018 2:03 pm
Hello Jay,
Welcome to the Simplify3D forum. This is not a feature in Simplify3D at this time. I do have some additional questions before before I log this feature request with our development team.
How would you like for something like this to work? My first thought would be that the software would look for changes to the model file that you've imported and offer to update the model if a change is detected. However, I can see some situations where more of a manual replacement might also be desired, such as the same model being updated and then saved with iterative filenames rather than replacing the existing model.
Thanks,
Thank you for the welcome and inquisitive reply. I would actually prefer manual and not automatic. Or even just the ability, and maybe this is already the case with the .stl files being hidden away in a folder I'm unaware of, but if I could just in its residing folder replace the .stl with an updated one of the same name and re-open the .fff file, though an update command would be a bit more convenient and maybe easy for your team to implement if already that far. Any of those would be plenty good enough for me. It almost looks like the workaround is possible, as when I save, the status message bottom left of screen says saving saving saving of an .stl file for each model in the list, but I haven't figured out where those are saving, I'm assuming internal to the .fff file. -Jay
I'd like to add my emphatic support for this feature. Now that I am using S3D to slice multimaterial prints for a Palette 2 Pro, the inability to swap out an updated STL file is wasting a maddening amount of my time. If after I have spent time prepping and perfecting a multimaterial print, I find out that one single STL component needs to be updated, I basically have to trash the entire construct and start over again.... Re-import STLs, align models origins, group models together, resize, reposition, open all four Processes, and re-assign them to each part of the model, rebuild all of your custom supports, and then re-slice. For a large, complex project, and for a troublesome STL that needs to be tweaked over and over again until it slices correctly, redoing all of these steps on every single iteration is absolutely painful.
Being able to leave a mostly completed multimaterial project as-is, and simply update a source STL would be a god-send feature... something I would absolutely pay (more) money for to be honest. And I agree with the previous poster...a manual process would be best, not automatic. I'm simply envisioning an "Update Model" button within the component properties page, that then lets you select the updated STL on your computer, and swaps it out in your project.
I'll add my name to the list of people that think this should be a priority upgrade. I have large-format industrial printers with the ability to plate many items on the bed. The issue is that the S3D auto-arrange function is not very efficient in packing the duplicated model across the available space. I always end up moving every copy to more tightly pack them in. If it did a decent job in packing them together and arranging this request would be a non-issue.
BUT - If there is even a small change to the stl file (which happens a lot) this means that I have to delete the bed layout and start over and this does take a lot of time and is frustrating since the file is essentially the same, with only minor changes.
If the software could simply reload the stl model from the original file location this would be acceptable. I normally do model versioning, but would be willing to rename the updated file to the same name and directory where the plated file is located.