Update Live Linking

[theAVator]

I would suggest updating Live Linking to be a 100% manual process. Even taking my shoes off I don't have enough digits to count how many times live linking has interrupted something I was doing to perform an Automatic update, which is extremely frustrating. However, the only way for the CREO plugin to work is for it to be on in preferences. Even if in CREO I set the plugin to only perform Manual updates, the preference in Keyshot will override it and try to force an automatic live link update anyways. I feel like this setting should be updated or modified to work better.

Especially considering that Creo needs to be open, the model you're updating from needs to be open in Creo, Keyshot needs to be open, and the model being updated needs to be open in Keyshot - the automatic update supposes/assumes a lot of things are in place for it to be successful. I can say that in my workflow that is almost never the case and I would be very surprised if anyone's workflow followed that enough for automatic updates to be useful. I would think it's pretty rare that people have both their CAD program open with a full model loaded and Keyshot open with a full model loaded simultaneously all the time. There might be a few examples, for instance prototyping or something like that you would do it, but it seems more likely that you are manually going to push an update as opposed to waiting for the automatic update to run.

1. Separate out the part of it that the Plugin uses to send models from the program (Creo in my case) and make it its own preference in Keyshot. Call it "Allow Plugins" or "Connect Plugin" or something, idk get creative with the name. In any case make it a separate preference that enables linking for the plugin to work, but does not force automatic updates to occur.

2. In the modified Live Linking preference, make an option available for "Manual Updates Only" that prevents Keyshot from performing an automatic update. The default for the selected Live Linking preference can still be to perform automatic updates, but this new option would allow users to override that and make it manual only. (Or flip flop it and make manual update only the default and have perform automatic updates the exception - again I'm not picky as long as there is a choice.)

Maybe I'm way off base, but I've had too many instances where I've been selecting wires or specific parts and had the live link dialogue box pop up and try importing some phantom data only to stall out because there is no data to import, or for me to cancel the request which in turn deselects everything I had been doing and forcing me to start over again. Or in last night's instance interrupt the render queue and not render the images I needed for today.  So, that's my reasoning for why automatic live linking should either just go away or be modified to allow for better control over it.