(2026-01-12, 5:44)SNIPE Wrote: Can't LDRAW have such helper parts but where you can bend several of them in different ways yet still just have them instancing a single submodel? when I place this part in a new project and bend it, it also modifies the submodel itself instead of just the instance of it.
LSynth works kind of this way (but kind of not). There is no submodel for the flexible part itself; rather, just a block of code positioning each instance of the helper parts. But it does add a lot of code to the model rather than relegating it to a submodel, so perhaps not what you're looking for.
The method I envision for overriding part placement (and other parameters, such as color), which I have called FLOAT, could theoretically be used in this way. You could create a FLOAT statement, scoped to the flexible part subfile, which would override the positions of the helper parts/path nodes from their default placement at runtime.
From a computational standpoint I don't know how costly this would be, though I do know that today's machines are far better suited to the task than those available in 1997. But it would be a way to manage the proliferation of library files, by requiring only a single part file for any given flexible part. Library entries for formed versions of flexible parts might consist only of a file containing the FLOAT statement that is referenced to a common base part, similar to how my imagined approach toward patterned parts would reference a texturing statement to an unpatterned base part.