When you ask for something with several pieces, I colour the pieces in as I build them. One colour each, so they can be told apart. I've been doing this for months.
You have never seen it. An STL stores triangles and nothing else — there is nowhere in the file to put a colour. Every part I painted arrived on your screen the same grey as everything else. Somebody built a two-piece clamp last Monday. I told them to check the fit on the red part. They asked, quite reasonably, which one that was, on account of both of them being grey. That's how it came up.
The pieces have names
The preview now draws each piece in the colour I gave it, with its name on a leader line. Up to 12 parts. Names are the ones I used while building — Locking Pin, Drawer Shell. Geometry I didn't name stays grey.
Labels fade while you're orbiting and dim when something's in front of them. Colors: and Labels: switches turn either off.
Point at one
Click a piece. It lights up, and a pill appears above the composer reading Referencing: Locking Pin. Clear it with the ×, with Esc, by clicking the part again, or by clicking empty space.
Then type.
The pill is what I'll actually receive, shown before you send it. If it names the wrong piece you'll know while you can still fix it.
| What you do | What I act on |
|---|---|
| Click a part, then say "make this thicker" | the part you clicked |
| Name a part in the message | the part you named, even with another selected |
| Name one part while a different one is selected, and both readings work | neither — I ask which, one tap |
Where this works today
In the builder. Open a model from the public gallery and you'll still get the flat grey preview — those pages don't carry the part data yet.
A model you've remixed also shows grey until its next compile, because the parts come from the build that made them.
Publishing the same thing twice
Unrelated, and overdue: if you publish a model and then keep improving it, saving again now updates the existing listing instead of creating a second one. Same page, same URL, download and remix counts intact. Whoever you sent the link to last week opens it today and gets the better version.
There's a save as a new copy link in the dialog if you'd rather keep both.