When creating the Spitfire, in the other thread, I used the Hide function a couple of times. However, some 20 file saves further along from that, my final file saves to, both , 3DM and IGES format, result in these missing parts when those files are opened in Carrara6Pro?

The same file, saved as LWO, opened quite OK in Carrara!

In MoI, there seems to be a sequence that needs to be observed to get the Hide to function well also?
(When trying to unhide one seems to get everything hidden and you have to keep on clicking Hide to get all reinstalled correctly----well something like that--I just kept clicking till all came good!)

Hi Brian, not sure what's going on with your particular file - can you please send it to me at moi@moi3d.com, so I can take a look?

But from your description it sounds like Carrara is having a problem creating a mesh from some of your surfaces - that would be something that would need to be fixed inside of Carrara. When you export to .lwo the mesh conversion is taking place inside of MoI instead. (also you might try using .obj format instead of .lwo if that works ok, Carrara may be able to read additional smoothing information that is stored in the .obj format).


Hide is a little complicated - the complexity is a trade-off for making it more powerful instead of needing additional hide/show buttons.

The part that can be confusing is when you go to show things.

When you show objects, everything is put "on hold" for a moment, and all the objects that are hidden are displayed temporarily.

At this point if you only want to show just one of those objects, you can pick it and then right-click (or push done), and only that one object that you specified will be shown.

If you click "hide" again or push done without selecting anything, then all hidden objects will be shown.

The reason why it works this way is to support this scenario : say you have a scene with a bunch of objects and you have currently hidden 20 different objects. Now you want to work on just one of those objects. To do this, press Hide (with nothing selected so it will trigger showing) then you will see those 20 hidden objects temporarily, and you can pick the one you want to work on, and press Done. The result will be just that one object will get un-hidden and the other 19 will remain hidden. If it showed everything all at once, you would have to then select and hide those other 19 objects.

Let me know if this still isn't clicking and I can prepare some illustrated steps which will help make it clearer.

- Michael

Hi Brian, tomorrow I'll cook up some illustrated and clearer steps to explain how showing objects works.

- Michael

Hi Brian, here is some additional explanation for how hide/show works.

For hiding an object, it is pretty straightforward - if something is selected and you push Hide, it will hide that object.

To show objects, you push the "Hide" button when there is nothing selected. There are some extra options for show which I'm going to cover here.

Here's an example - I've got an object showing, with 6 hidden objects:



Now I want to work on one of the hidden objects, so I would like to show it.

To do this, I will make sure the selection is cleared by clicking in an empty spot, and then push the Hide button.

Now the display will shift temporarily - all of the objects that are hidden will now be the only things displayed:



Also note that there is a prompt in the upper-right corner of the screen that says "Select objects to show".

At this point, you now have a choice - if you want to show just one of the hidden objects, you can select it and then push Done.

On the other hand if you want to show all objects, you can push "Done" without selecting anything, or you can also push the "Hide" button a second time as another way to show everything.

In this case I only wanted to show just one object, so I select it:



Then when I push Done, the display is shifted back to normal, and the original object is there, plus just the one hidden object that I selected:




So the key thing is that all the hidden objects are temporarily displayed to give you a chance to show just some smaller amount of them instead of all of them.

- Michael

Thanks Michael.