TheRiddick wrote: ↑Fri Jul 07, 2017 11:22 pm
Is there not a way to do this without having a billion processes? say I want to print 20 parts, that means I must manually create 20 processes, what a headache. Can't S3D be told to treat each object separate and finish a layer of object 1, then move to 2, etc etc so simply yet I don't see a easy way to do it for many small objects.
If you are trying to "finish a layer of object 1, then move to 2, etc" then you aren't printing sequentially. Sequentially here means the entire part is printed, then next part is printed. What you described is continuous printing (each layer of each part is printed then the next layer of each part). If you play with the height clearance, you can adjust how much of each part is printed before the head moves to the next part.
If you want to do sequential printing you need to have a separate profile(s) for each part. If you have only one profile, you can still select sequential, but you'll see that it defaults to continuous because the program doesn't have any info about the order you want the parts printed.
So yes, you must go through the laborious task of creating multiple processes. The easiest way to do it is to do MODEL A first, then group the processes together (CRTL+G), then copy the part, then the process group. The purpose of using the group is that whatever variable you update in one process for the group, will update to all processes of the group IF that variable was the same for all the processes. Here's the video explaining it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbQfifnzL4Q
CAVEAT:
Unfortunately, the group editing process does not include the model selection. For example, say you have MODEL A, and MODEL A is printed using GROUP A (3 processes). All 3 of those processes in GROUP A will have MODEL A selected as the part they are supposed to be applied to. Now you copy GROUP A, and call it GROUP B. Of course, if you look at any of the processes in GROUP B, they will still reference MODEL A. In theory, according to the way groups should work, if you modify one of the processes in GROUP B to select MODEL B, all the other processes in GROUP B should be updated with that change. However, that does not happen. You have to manually edit every process to select MODEL B. So if you have 200 processes, you will need to update each one. Hopefully--one day--that oversight will be addressed.