Profile Management Questions

[MoeweX]

Hi,

I just bought Simplify3D and I am currently trying to figure out how to see what changes I made to a profile. Sometimes I play around with the settings and I would like to finally check them again before I overwrite my existing profile. In addition, is there a way to compare profiles and see what settings differ? Finally, I sometimes just want to reset the settings to the values stored in the original profile, how can I archive that? Even if I change everything back manually, Simplify3D still puts a (modified) behind my profile's name.

I know how to do that in Slic3r and Cura, but could not find the settings for Simplify3D .

Best,
Jonathan.

[brian442]

My preferred way to compare 2 profiles is to export both of them by going to File > Export FFF Profile. Then you can just do a text comparison and it's easy to see the changes.

If you want to get rid of any modifications that you made to a profile, just select any other profile from the "Select profile" drop down list, and then choose No when it asks if you want to save the changes you made to your previous profile. Then your modifications will be ignored.

[MoeweX]

Hi Brian,

thank you for your tips . So you always have to change profiles in order to reset one? I think Simplify3D should have a simpler way of doing that.
I would also love to see a comparison functionality added, especially because it seems like you cannot identify changes you made to a profile without saving it first to a new profile and then exporting it as you described.

Do you think I should open a feature request or are they not really analyzed by the Simplify3D team (or are you actually working for them? ).

Best,
Jonathan.

[jfkansas]

I stopped dealing with profiles a long time ago. I just save factory files now and I name them with what type of filament I used in that factory file. When I have a similar object to print I look through my factory files for the closest match, open, save as and import new STLs.

I store all my factory files on a cloud "One Drive", so that my factory files are accessible from any machine with an installed copy.

[MoeweX]

Thank you for your replies! This sounds like Simplify3D does not provide "real" profile management functionalities. To bad :/. Anyways, thank you both for your tips, they already helped me a lot.

[brian442]

Do you think I should open a feature request or are they not really analyzed by the Simplify3D team (or are you actually working for them?

Maybe they could add an extra button so it can be done in 1 click instead of 2 or 3, but personally, I'd probably rather have them focus on other things since this one doesn't really bother me much. They do have several employees that read all of the features requests, so you can post it in that subforum if you want.

[gwhite]

I also find "version control" to be very difficult. For example, I have a profile for eSun PLA+, but I just changed to a new spool of a different color, and I'm having to re-tweak things. I'm also learning as I go, and am frequently adjusting various parameters to suit a given model. Even if I create a new profile for every spool of filament I own, I may have one with supports turned on (or several with different support spacings depending on the model size), different amounts of infill, etc.. Keeping track of all this stuff is getting to be a nightmare. I've already grabbed a profile by mistake once that had some bad start-up settings buried in it that kept crashing my printer. I'm beginning to use file names like "eSun PLA+ Blue w 2mm Support Grid 10 pct Infill 10-11-17", which is getting a bit tiresome.

Rather than having stuff scattered on 11(!) different tabs, a one page summary of commonly adjusted parameters would be helpful. If you make changes to a profile that you haven't saved, you could flag them in red on the summary page. Once you've got a summary page, another useful feature would be a comparison button that highlites differences between two summary pages. That way you could keep a default profile to compare to. This would make it much easier to track changes.

Thanks!