AJ Christensen

Aha! Thanks for the ideas. It sounds like STL is not the super advanced file format I was imagining. I will investigate PLY and OBJ options. It looks like STP is the most advanced CAD format, but I'm not seeing a ton of options for exporting that from Houdini. I'd be glad if someone could change my mind

I am starting to experiment with 3D printing, and I have a Bambu 3D printer with automatic material switcher. The Bambu Studio software accepts STL files. If I split a model into 4 meshes, and save those as 4 separate STL files, I can assign 4 different filament colors to each of those files.

I am led to believe online that STL files can combine all 4 of those meshes. But I can't figure out how to make an STL file with multiple separate meshes in Houdini. When I use a Merge SOP on my 4 meshes and then pipe that into a ROP Geometry Output node, the resulting STL file only appears to have 1 object in the Bambu Studio slicer app. I've tried toying with Packed Primitives, but don't really understand how they work.

Has anyone done this before? Any ideas? Or am I wrong about how STL files work?

Whoa wait what - how? How do you render geometry to an image and import it as an image in the network view? Is this a live connection, or has a static image been rendered out and is just imported to the network view?