Cura: Multiply object as a grid

[tlhintoq]

Setting up lots of objects on a bed is long drawn-out workflow, if you don't want some weird random placement.

Some sort of "Matrix Multiply" would be great; where you feed X and Y spacing. The attached screen shot is 90 items with x & y of 30 each. That bed of objects took just over 30 minutes to layout.

• Bring in 1 object
• Multiply it one time
• Manually set the X and Y

• Repeat 8 more times to make one row

• Group all of those

• Manually multiply it 1 time
• Set the X and Y
• Repeat it 4 more times to make a half bed
• Group all
• Manually multiply 1 time
• Set the X and Y
• Finally have a full bed

OBSERVATION: With every paste of a single row of objects the waiting time gets longer and longer, until you can grab the row and set the position. Which seems a bit odd for an 8 core i7 with 32gig of RAM and seriously fast dual SSD drives, running no other apps but Cura while doing this work.
Automatically slice is NOT ticked on: So it shouldn't be doing exponentially more work with each iteration of adding objects.

In the end, repeating 1 group of 4 rows is a lot faster than repeating 1 row, 4 times.
And with 90 items on the bed, every action is very very slow.
Select all...
Wait 20 seconds
Click in the X location field
{not responding for 20 seconds}

So being able to define a matrix instead of just "Multiply 70 times" without knowing in advance just how many could fit - and resulting it strange placements - would be a great boost to shop efficiency.

Do something while its busy

[monkeymademe]

If you used silhouette studio they do this grid multiply! its very handy and missing from cura

[nallath]

Re-working the arrange algorithm is pretty high up on our backlog on our internal tracker (CURA-7259)

[tlhintoq]

@nallath
Re-working the arrange algorithm is pretty high up on our backlog on our internal tracker (CURA-7259)

High up... Meaning towards the top of the list... high-ish in priority... So might see some love sooner rather than later?

[tlhintoq]

@monkeymademe
If you used silhouette studio they do this grid multiply! its very handy and missing from cura

Hadn't heard of of silhouette studio. I'll take a look. Thanks for the tip

UPDATE: From the description

Silhouette Studio software gives you the ability to design projects to send to any Silhouette electronic cutting machine.

So its software for a cutter, not a 3d slicer. CanvasWorkspace for my Brother cutter does it too.
Well.. There's plenty of software for other industries that do matrix multiplication. Pretty much any/every graphic arts program. None of them really apply here though.

[nallath]

@nallath
Re-working the arrange algorithm is pretty high up on our backlog on our internal tracker (CURA-7259)

High up... Meaning towards the top of the list... high-ish in priority... So might see some love sooner rather than later?

Assuming nothing changes, I'd say within the next few sprints.

[tlhintoq]

@nallath
Outstanding!
I'll be on that beta as soon as I see it. If you want a tester faster than that - hit me up.

[tlhintoq]

Side note:
The same PC that created this file yesterday - slowly with that many objects - cannot open it today. Cura locks up. Have to kill it in Task Manager.

So now I have to remake the file rather than make one little change. Clearly I'll do it with less objects.

[Ghostkeeper]

We've made a few improvements to how Cura handles many objects on the build plate in v4.5, but it's not quite there yet.