Hi Tony,

> For example: I might set up two groups, control panel bottom
> and control panel top. In these groups I can have sub groups
> for the lights, switches, buttons etc.. But then I can style
> things differently too. So all lights can be green regardless
> of which group they are in. So I could hide all the lights with
> one click (see next comment).

Hi Tony, yup you've got the right idea!

Also separately from making the lights green in order to hide them, the styles assignment will also control material assignments when you export to a mesh format.

So it is good to have that as a separate thing so that you are able to apply the same material to different things regardless of what group it is in.


Basically the styles are something that you need to be able to set as an object property in order to set up material assignments.

Once there is some common property between objects, it is nice if there is a standard way to select them, hide them, etc... by targeting all objects that have that property in common, that's all that styles section is for.


I've been thinking recently that I will probably be able to make some similar entries in the scene browser for hiding all objects of a certain type, like hiding all curves. This could be another "built in" group that lets you apply some common actions (hide, show, select, etc...) that have a common attribute.


re: selection
> Yes, I think this is a great idea!! Please don't put it in a flyout.

It's actually not really that horrible to have it on a flyout, you would be able to do something like click down and drag over to the flyout that pops out and release the mouse over a button to make it do that thing, that is actually pretty fast.

But yeah it would be good if selection could be on top if possible... I have been thinking of making a click on the right-side zone of the name could possibly work for that. There could be a kind of selection button that only shows up over there when you have moved your mouse over top of the item, that would keep it from cluttering things up too much.


> Maybe should there be a select by colour command too? I'm
> maybe muddying the waters here I think :-)

Not at all - in fact the idea of having that Styles section is to allow for all the same kinds of operations on colors (styles) as groups, like hide, show, select...


>> Also I think that right-click on the eye will turn off
>> all the other objects and only keep just those ones visible
> Another good one - please keep this in. How would you
> will bring them all back, though?

Another right-click on the same one - one right click would make it the only visible one and turn off all other ones, but if you right click on one that was already the only visible one it will turn them all on.

This is actually how the Object Snap menu (the menu that pops up from the little arrow that appears over the Object Snap button on the lower toolbar when you move your mouse there) works currently to manage applying check marks to all items in that list, if you want to try it out there.

Also you'll still be able to use the regular Hide command to hide and show objects as well.


re: separate window - that's something that would be good to include but it may have to wait for a while, it is just hard for me to manage too many options for this all in the initial go around. It's kind of a general problem that it would be nice to be able to tear off chunks of UI and dock them into other montiors (on the same monitor you'll just be having a floating window that obscures the modeling viewports as well) but it's a lot of work to make a whole system for that.


Thanks very much for the feedback!

- Michael