Oh, ha ha. %|
It’s the version in Debian “Stable” IIRC. I’m looking into upgrading it today to 2.36 (which is in “Unstable”). I’ve just started learning it after having it sit around for most of a year — note the sig. But as Blender was “mature” “production code” at 2.0, I wouldn’t have expected it to be that different.
This version has more feature for placing the imported objects in a Scene.
Okay, sounds promising.
I think that you could try to select all the objects you want, in the Object library with the right mouse button. The selected lines should be highlighted in blue.
Yep, “click items with the right mouse button, get a blue highlight, all selected items import”. Discovered that minutes after I posted the above (why does that always happen?). Works okay, although that’s still pretty painful — it would make more logical sense to respect the parent/group relationships in the original file, ISTM. Still, it’s good to know I’m not an idiot.
Perhaps this will get better with the upgrade.
Beware that they will imported onto the layer they were placed in the file they come from ! So, it is a good thing to show every layer when importing objects from other files.
The imported objects are also placed at the coordinate that were theirs in the former file. If the scale of the two files are not the same, the objects can be very big or very small. In this case, you can have some difficulties to find them in the new file ! You’ll have to find them and rescale them to match the scale of your current scene.
Nah. That’s exactly what I’d hope for — the obnoxious thing would be if the objects forgot their locations and all imported at the origin. Then I’d lose my carefully composed groups.
You see I composed a file to use to model 0.3" and 0.6" DIP package IC chips — but I wanted to be able to do any number of pins. So each chip is actually a series of identical segments representing the middle of the chip, with special “head” and “tail” segments. So I can do anything from a 4-pin opto-isolation device to a 40-pin 8051 chip. But they’re not one object.
The home button of the keyboard enlarges the window field in order to show all the objects. This can help you to find them.
Yep, sussed that.
The interface is off-putting when you get started, but I’m warming up to it. It’s able to hold an enormous amount of options which is always a design challenge in a GUI program. Commercial CAD programs often give up at this level of complexity* and resort to a command-line system. But that’s really clunky. The Blender design is better — no doubt because the writers actually intended to use the program. 
[quote]And download the 2.36 !/quote]
Yeah, I’ll probably do that now that I’m seriously learning Blender. I’ve been at it all of four days now. 
Getting results already, though, which is moderately impressive. I figured the learning curve would be steeper than it is. Many new illustrations of mine will be coming from Blender, I can see now. 8)
Thanks and nice to meet you. 
*To be fair, it’s been a long time since I seriously looked at one, but I think this is still largely true.