Hello, I was also wondering on how to update an existing collection in Blender (the source being Archicad, which also has some elements from Rhino).
With each update a new collection is created:
BTW, what exactly is the difference between receiving as “Collection Instance” or “Linked Duplicate”?
What is being discussed in this thread is how I would imagine to use Speckle:
- Import the model (first time) from Speckle (Archicad, Rhino, and occasional Revit used in my current workflow).
- Modify the model (UVs, materials…)
- Update the model, then import it again.
- Keep unmodified elements intact with modified UVs, etc.
- Possibly delete the modified elements from the original collection and put only those in a new one (I’m curious about your takes here): this would make tracking changes easier, as otherwise you would need to troubleshoot based on the online viewer’s comparison feature.
Additional, material-related behaviour:
It would be nice to already assign modified materials to the updated elements (e.g. you have “Concrete 27” from Archicad as a material, which you would modify to CONCRETE from your library, either by replacing it or using the node editor to change completely).
I would expect new objects that would have Concrete 27 to use CONCRETE instead. I get, that some workflows might expect to receive it as is, but I would be happy to have a checkbox for this feature.)
This would help me have a seamless in-house archviz workflow. For example Twinmotion has a nice model-update to aid workflows. Maybe this question would worth its own thread. (?)