Live linking improvements

[eric]

Live linking is one of the most valuable features added in KS4.

Although there is always room for improvements;

I work with SolidWorks.

what we are going to do often (as we did before with the "keep materials" setting)
is make a few faces a different color to be able to apply different mappings in KS.
For example a wooden bar where the grain mapping should be in the right direction for all sides.

When I only change the color of a face in SW and press update it will not update the KS scene.
It only does when I also change a feature (cut extrude etc.) Then the face color is also changed in KS.

So it seems that there is something extra needed to trigger the plugin to update a part.

Same goes for suppressing features and exploded views, and maybe more fatures.
(unsuppressing a feature does trigger the updater.)
Pressing rebuild in SW doesn't help.

I think the plug in looks if parts have changed and only then updates the scene.
It would in this case be very handy to have a "force update" button. so that even parts that the updater thinks have not changed will be updated in KS.

Maybe it can even be done by a SW macro that refreshes the SW scene.

[Speedster]

I agree, Eric.  Would be nice if ANY change, including mapping, suppressing, etc. could update.  Maybe sort of like "CTRL+Q", which forces a complete rebuild in SolidWorks.  The thing that often happens is we miss a surface or something in mapping.
Bill G

[guest84672]

Thanks for the feedback. We will take this into consideration for the next updates of both the plugin and KeyShot.

One thing I just found out is that you can select parts inside SolidWorks and then hit "update". This will then force the select parts to be transferred to KeyShot. However, the updates based on material changes are still somewhat sketchy even using this method. We are looking at improving this. We realize that this is an important piece in the overall workflow.

[eric]

Thanks Thomas,

I will try that.

In the meanwhile I have a file where changed parts duplicate in KS4 pro floating every update I do from Solidworks.

What is the reason for this?

(the SW model and .bip where closed and reopend/reconnected)

[guest84672]

We will look into this.