I really like how the hide command works, but I can't seem to be able to maintain what it's doing.
If I click once it hides the selected object. that works fine.
Now if I click twice it hides everything but that object, which is exactly what I want to do, but for some reason this action cannot be maintained. If I click done or anything else for that matter it goes back to hiding the original object.
I think it would make more sense to iterate between hidden objects with one button instead of going to the select panel, inverting the selection, and then going back to click hide again.

Hi Niko,

I'm still not comfortable with the hide command too ... that's why I use this script

script:moi.geometryDatabase.invertSelection(); moi.geometryDatabase.hide( true );

to hide everything but the selected objects.

I think the confusion may be the second click is doing what it would normally do in the case of "nothing being selected" which is "show what is hidden"....Then at that point you would select any of the hidden objects you want to show again and say done, and they appear in the whole scene again with the rest of the objects.

So the second click is not a "reversal" of what will be hidden. Paq's script can do the reversal, then use the hide command.

Hi niko, I'm going to be trying to simplify this with the next beta so that it is not quite so confusing.

Right now the way it works if you have a selected object, then clicking hide will hide it - so that part is pretty straightforward.

However, if you do not have any selected objects, then it will be using the "show objects" mode instead.

The "show objects" mode is like the "ShowSelected" command in Rhino, where the goal is to allow you to possibly show just some of the currently hidden objects instead of all of them.

In order to allow you to show just some objects, the display is temporarily inverted so that you can see all the hidden objects and select some of them. Then when you hit "Done" or right-click you will exit the temporary mode and those objects you selected in this stage will become un-hidden, with all the ones that you did not select remaining hidden.

While you are in that "select which objects to show" mode, you can also either push "Done" without selecting anything, or right-click in a viewport which is an alias for pushing "Done", or click the Hide button a second time which is in this case another alias for the same thing, which will then show all objects instead of only some objects.

Hopefully that may better explain how it currently works?


I am planning on tuning this up shortly - I'm going to be switching it so that a left-click on Hide will either hide selected objects, or show all objects. Then a right-click will be used for either "isolate selection" (hide all others than currently selected) or "show just some objects" if there was no selection.


Right now to get an actual "isolate" (invert selection then hide) function you need to set up the script that PaQ shows above on a keyboard shortcut rather than using Hide - Hide in the current release of MoI does not really do "isolate", but rather "show some (not necessarily all) objects". It just happens that something similar to "isolate" is one stage of "show some objects".

Let me know if none of this makes any sense... :) But I believe that this will be all cleared up with the changes that I am going to be doing shortly though.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I just wondering, with the coming of the new group/style stuff, is it possible to isolete-unisolete something without changing anything to the layer visibility ?

For example, you have 3 group ... group 1 is visible, group 2 and 3 are hiden.
You are working on the layer one, and you isolate an objet ...

It would be really nice if an un-isolate option is available (even just with a shortcut), so you dont change the visibility settings from the group 2 and 3 (they still are 'off')

(hope it's clear enough :P))

Hi PaQ, I think I know what you mean.

Maybe the way it could work is that if you do an Isolate (by making a selection and then right-click on Hide), then later on if you do a right-click with no selection, I can do the "Show some objects" function but populate the selection with the saved state from when you did the isolate, so that if you hit ok (or clicked again) at that point it could effectively work as an "undo isolate".

That's may be worth a try.

The other thing that I could do is that if you have done an "isolate", then later on use that right-click-with-no-selection function to just be an immediate "undo isolate" just completely instead of the "show some objects" function. That may be more simple but then you would lose the ability to do a general "show only some objects" function at any time.

- Michael