Groups help with organizing a project
What are groups?
Groups are multiple parts or slice stacks put into a subfolder, or node, of the project tree.
What can groups do for me?
- Keep the project tree tidy: Having a project with large or increasing numbers of parts or slices can make the
project tree unwieldy. Collapse groups so that only the group title is visible, with the contents within not taking up tree space anymore.
- Categorize parts: Using the group name you can sort parts as needed.
- Set a temporary display color: You may define a display color for a group. This temporarily overrides the display colors of all parts existing within, or moved into, this group. Temporary means that parts retain their original display color and take it on again when moved back out of the group.
Note: For slice stacks, this is permanent.
- Override visibility of grouped parts: By using the group's visibility switches, you switch the visibility of all parts included in the group. This acts only as an immediate switch: Any parts which are currently visible are set to invisible (or vice versa, depending on the group visibility switch you used), but after using the group's visibility switch of the group, you're free to switch the visibility of individual parts.
- Control packer and collision detection: Groups can be
locked. This has effects on packing and collision detection:
- If the physical expansion of a group exceeds platform dimensions, the group is considered a single part and put outside the platform, otherwise the individual parts are packed.
-
Scanline packing offers an option to rotate parts before starting to pack, to check for orientations that might fit better. When this option is active, it is ignored for parts in a locked group.
- Parts within a
locked group are not checked for
collisions between them.
Important: Locking a group does
not prevent parts from being moved at all. Instead, select all parts other than the ones you want to remain stationary, then make use of
Pack only selected parts where available.
- Preserve arrangement during moving: Parts in a group are moved and rotated as one when the group is
locked.
- Protect parts from accidental deletion: Parts in a locked group cannot be deleted manually from the project tree or by using the
Delete keyboard command.
Note: Operations like Repair that offer to delete the original part before substituting the modified version, however, still override this protection.
- Process multiple parts at once: Selecting a group selects all items contained, providing quick access to them for actions that apply to selections, such as packing only those selected parts, applying existing repair or support scripts,
Example: 3D-modeled, graphical assets usually do not care about
self-intersections and
holes or
open shells. Cleaning them up and preparing them to meet the demands of additive manufacturing can leave you with a large number of individual shells resulting from splitting self-intersections. By sorting the shells into groups named
shells to keep and
shells to discard, you could reassemble the model with just those shells that you need for preparing a properly closed surface. But instead of actually moving or deleting the shells that are not needed, you would move them between groups, preserving the positional information, let alone the very existence in the project, in case you need the shell after all. In effect, this allows
non-linear deletion and restoration.