About Groups

Groups help with organizing a project

Part and slice groups can make large numbers of items more manageable. For instance, when you have a part with many individual shells, you could sort them into those to keep and those to discard without having to rely on Undo and Redo when using Delete.

Benefits of groups

• Organize parts and shells: Having a project with large or increasing numbers of parts or slices can make the project tree unwieldy. Groups can be collapsed so that only the group title is visible, with the contents within not taking up tree space anymore.
• Sort parts: Using the group name you can sort parts as needed.
  Example: For instance, after import of 3D graphics models that usually do not care about inner structures, you may end up 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!
• Set a temporary display color: You may define a display color for a group. This will temporarily override the display colors of all parts existing within, or moved into, this group. Temporary means that parts retain their original display color and will 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 will be 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 behavior: Groups can be locked. This has two effects on packing:
  • The Scanline Packer 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.
  • 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.
• Select parts and apply actions: 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,