About the Filament Library

It's going to get MUCH MUCH better

Lilith isn't germain to this post, but she's cool and topical, and I think it came out super well.

So I know a lot of people are excited about the filament library - and I am too. But at launch, it’s not going to be all that great.

First - I just don’t have time to test that many filaments while also coding, making tutorials, and getting all the other infrastructure ready. And if there is one consistent message I’ve heard from people who want HueForge, it is “Shut up and take my money!” (Which I’m definitely prepared to do).

Also, Polymaker reached out to me and wants to do some really cool things around HueForge, one of which is that they committed to calculating Transmission Distance (turns out it’s harder to say transmissivity in one word than Transmission Distance as two, so I’m going to change what I use) for all of their filaments. They just want me to tell them how first.

So after launch, I will be building a test rig for this (I invite suggestions. I have some really basic ideas that should work, and I’m hoping that with enough data, I can get a good number with just a single measurement on most filaments.) and working with Polymaker to library their entire filament collection.

I welcome other manufacturers wanting to do the same thing.

But no one wants an enormous library of filaments to look through when they don’t have the majority of them. It makes finding the filaments you DO have nearly impossible.

So the library is going to become a set of libraries. Your active library is what you have loaded. But you will be able to search the other libraries you have (From friends, or filament companies etc) for appropriate filaments for your use case. Possibly even with a “Buy now” button that takes you right to the page with that filament. (This kind of thing could help keep HueForge affordable - but I never want to shove it in your face, it’s there as a convenience, not a cudgel). I’ll be working to make that search as intuitive and simple as possible.

Meanwhile I will be adding functionality IMMEDIATELY after launch to allow exporting and importing libraries so that users can categorize and share their filaments easily with the community. Right now you would need to manually copy them in (which is easy) - or import someone else’s project file which will have their filament definitions in them and will add those filaments to your library as “Unowned”.

So basically, this is me setting expectations. Filament library is important, but it will hold up an otherwise perfectly useable tool for much too long if I try to get it fully complete before release. So it will be basic functionality for you to save your own filaments with SOME filaments in there, but nowhere near an exhaustive list. But I have better functionality ranked just behind bug-fixing for post-release development time.