Hi Patrick,

> The eye icons can also be a bit confusing - and maybe that's
> actually why i find the system confusing at times.

Well, they basically are showing you what is the current state of all the objects that belong to that "slot".

If all objects that fit in that slot are on, then you see the eye.

If all objects that fit in the slot are hidden, then it is blank.

If some objects that belong to that slot are hidden and some are on, then it shows the half eye.


> Say I want to see the faces of style magenta.

There isn't really a good way to do that currently - when you go to the Types section of the browser, the "slots" in there are not referring to or targeting style information at all. Style information is only currently targeted by the things in the Styles section, not in other sections.

So for example when you see that slot for Types / Faces, it means "All faces in the entire model".

However, it tends to be rather common during more typical workflow to want to do things like just quickly hide all curves to get them out of the way - the Types section will handle that kind of need currently.

The kind of thing where you're talking about like "all faces that are magenta" is not really as typical.

I do have some ideas for handling that better with a kind of additional "filter" mechanism that you could specify, but that will be a pretty advanced and rather specialized kind of a thing.


> The info of the styles and types would be complementary in that
> way rather than double up.

I'll have to check your later message, I don't really see how that would work as the default way to do things, it would make for a pretty complex interaction between the different sections.

However, it may be possible that if you did a special action on an item, that could be a good way to specify it as a "filter" which then would have this kind of an effect on limiting what the other sections were acting on.

I was previously thinking about having some kind of more separate "filter" panel or menu or something like that on each section, but this could be an interesting idea to use the entries in the sections themselves as the filtering UI, with some kind of special action to set an item as an filtering item.

But trying to do such a thing as the default automatic way is going to make the regular use really quite difficult for a beginner, the current system where for example "Types / Curves" always just means "all curves" is really a lot more simple...

I need to catch up a bit on your newer messages to see if I fully understand what you are talking about though.

- Michael