UK
Joined: May 14, 2020
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Searching and Managing 'Furniture' ?
Hi folk, I'm looking for ways to search and manage Furniture models.
I have a large number of models loaded, including a bunch of my own, and I'm finding that searching for particular furniture is occupying a lot of my time. There are tables and chairs in several categories, for example. Even if the relevant thing is just in one category, there are often lots of examples, and some way to narrow the field would help.
I've experimented with extracting the model metadata from the libraries to do free-text searching, but that doesn't help much - the thing I really need is to be able to do this or something like it in the GUI.
There's an 'export as CSV' option, but I think this just exports a subset of furniture metadata and parameters from the current model.
So firstly, have I missed something ? Is there a way to search furniture models on a keyword, for example ? I'm using the current Linux version.
France
Joined: Nov 7, 2005
Post Count: 9423
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Re: Searching and Managing 'Furniture' ?
Did you try the search field available above the catalog when you select the option Searchable list in the preferences pane? It will let you search items from their name, category, creator and various keywords associated to them (like appliances, decoration items…).
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Emmanuel Puybaret, Sweet Home 3D creator
UK
Joined: May 14, 2020
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Re: Searching and Managing 'Furniture' ?
I thought I saw that field in a YouTube video, but couldn't see it when I ran the app. Didn't realise I needed to turn it on. Yes, I have it now, doh :(. Thanks for the quick response :)
UK
Joined: May 14, 2020
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Re: Searching and Managing 'Furniture' ?
.....ah.... but it doesn't appear to do what I thought it would. For example, when I select category 'All', and enter 'Table' as the search term, I see a subset of the models. It includes many Tables, but it also includes a Clock, an Air Mattress, a Garden Hut, a large number of Windows, two Horses, etc. When I restrict the category to Living Room, the result is mostly Tables, but I still get a laptop and a bar stool.
So I guess this is a metadata problem, and may be outside SH3D's control - if people tag laptops with 'table', this is what will happen. But who's going to label a Horse as a table ? Strange.
UK
Joined: May 14, 2020
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Re: Searching and Managing 'Furniture' ?
OK, understand now. The search is doing substring matching on all tags. This leads to very unpredictable results - if the user searches for 'Table', and a clock is tagged with 'Adjustable', then the Clock will be found, even if there's no obvious reason why because the tags are not exposed to the user. The Horses are found because 'Stable' is present as a tag.
Substring matching has some benefits, but it should be possible to devise a method of allowing exact matching. For example, a search string starting with an upper case letter will be exact-matched, but a lower case letter will use substring matching.
