When working with several build plates in a project, it would be really useful to be able to re-order them.
The Problem
Here’s a project with six plates. I’d love to be able to move Plate 6 above Plate 2…but to do that now I have to copy-and-paste the plate contents around and rename things. It’s a bit janky!
I’ll second that. These would be two very quality of life improvements. The collapse to plates feature alone would definitely help out a lot. When one is using the printer to print one model at a time, this may not seem like much of a big deal. But try printing an entire Bill of Material and one can see that this quickly gets out of control and one winds up in scrolling hell trying to visualize the build tree.
Here’s just one example. At least they added the search by part feature but it’s limited.
Granted there are a couple of duplicate plates in this image but I figure that since there are about 6 other plates to go along with this build that would have been in this array if I hadn’t given up, I think this represents a need for the ability to zoom all and the ability to reorder.
As is the inability to reorder filaments in the side panel.
If I wish to tidy out some filaments, I have to manually change them as I can’t reorder them. I can’t delete one specifically, it has to be the last one that gets removed!
These are basic software features.
Plus, all we are talking about is changing array element positions, most programming languages provide this as a single line of code. The UI interaction code is minimal.
Do you mean Printable and unprintable on a global basis, or actually hiding a plate from the layout altogether. I’d be in favor of the first, but making it no longer viewable in the Plates layout, I think that has the potential to screw up some peoples day.
I mean to hide the plate from the layout, but maybe this is not the right way to go about it. I certainly understand your concern. My problem that I would like to solve is that I find it sometimes hard to work on a single plate, when other plates are obscuring my view. Maybe a way to view a single plate vs seeing all, like a toggle, is a better way to go at it.
Making an object unprintable is sometimes quite handy, but I’m not sure what the use would be of making an entire plate unprintable. I could just choose not to print the plate…
+1 for the feature rearranging plates and collapsing/expanding all plates with one click. And as @MalcTheOracle also said, the same feature could be added to the filaments.
