Hi skello, thanks for your feedback!

One thing to keep in mind is that this part that I mentioned here is only one piece of the full object organization tools.

There will be another piece which will a kind of scene browser, which will be the thing that controls many of the grouping and kind of object batching tasks that was a big part of what you are asking about.

You can get an idea on what that part may be like from this previous discussion here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1944.1

I'm not quite ready to work on that part yet though - the part that I'm working on right now is how to edit the properties and appearance of objects (not including visibility for this part).


> what if i need to create an object with certain preset properties/style.
> ie i want to start drawing a red line. In this case how will i access this
> kind of property without having to create it first..

Currently I have not really placed a big priority on this.

But one idea is that inside of the "Style manager" dialog it could be possible to have a checkbox on a style that says "Use for new objects", and if you checked that box then that style would be the one applied to newly drawn objects.

Another idea involves the scene browser part - maybe it will be possible there to tag a particular group as being the one that newly drawn objects will belong to, and if all the other objects in that group have the same style, that style will get applied to the newly drawn object as well.


Actually, one thing that just occurred to me which may work well is to have a style property that shows up when there is nothing selected - that will show the "active style" used to draw new objects in. That would make it pretty quick to set this. The process would be: before you draw an object, deselect all current objects to make the "New object style" shown in that upper-right area of the window (where command options currently go), click on that to get the styles dropdown and set it to what you want, then when you draw the new objects will have that style applied to them.


> Does this setup mean you will need to have the object
> created or selected before you can see its properties
> dialog to modify? if so what happens if i have a hidden
> object i need to unhide or select.

Generally I try to follow a rule that hidden objects cannot be selected, because otherwise it is pretty easy to do things like unknowingly delete them.

But I think that there may be an exception to this (at least for a few particular uses) when you highlight objects inside the scene browser list, which will be another way for you to select objects rather than clicking on them inside the viewport.

So possibly to do the things you describe, you would go to the browser list, highlight the object, then the properties panel will show the properties for that object (even if it is hidden I think), and there will likely be a control built into the browser for unhiding an object or a whole group of objects at once.

> also how will i be able to modify say the swatch of multiple
> objects simultaneously?

When you have a multiple selection, the swatch control will still be available, it will just say something like "multiple styles" if there are objects with many different styles selected. You will then be able to click on that "multiple styles" entry to get the same style list dropdown as you normally would with a single selection, and when you pick a style there it will be applied to all selected objects.


> How are grouped object properties being handled especially visibility of objects.

The visibility will be controlled by something on the browser panel instead of on this object properties panel. It would otherwise not work very well to try and put it on the object properties panel because you have to have an alternate way to select a hidden object to make it visible. The browser panel will provide that.


> my main problem with moi is its inability to reduce
> clutter by hiding and unhiding objects in my workspace
> easily and efficiently

Yes - that is going to be a focus for the browser panel part.

- Michael