Hi Michael,

Just wondering about this part of the browser.


I never seem to have a need for it, but it's there, what would someone use it for?

Cheers

Hi Danny, well the idea for that was to try and have a type of basic filtering mechanism to allow for some combinations.

Like say you have a bunch of things with Style=Red and you want to hide just the red curves but not the red solids, and not any curves from other styles.

So one way you can make that happen is to go to the Style section and click the name label for Style=Red - that will select all the red stuff. (right click it if other things were already selected so it becomes the "isolated selection" and other things than red get deselected).

Now that you know that red stuff is selected you can go to Types > Selected, and now you can use the eye button for "Curves" there, and when you click it, it will hide only the selected curves, which you know are the red curves, so you have now hidden all red curves.

That was the idea for those 2 sub-sections under Types anyway.

I think that those will probably eventually get replaced with some kind of better filtering system in a future version though.


The "All objects" is different, it's just a simple way to hide/lock/select all objects instead of only those of a certain type.

- Michael

Probably in the future instead of having those special sections for "Selected" and "Unselected" there will instead be a "Set filter" option on a pop-out menu and there would be a variety of options for setting the filter, including selected / unselected but also other properties as well, and when you set the filter it would just change the behavior of that one regular Types section rather than having a repeat of all the controls like it currently does under "Selected" and "Unselected".

- Michael

Got it! thanks for the explanation Michael.
I see the logic, but seems a bit cumbersome for the filtering system.

> there will instead be a "Set filter" option
> on a pop-out menu and there would be
> a variety of options for setting the filter,

This sounds better, I'm picturing something like you tick or pick type (say curve) and the colour from the filter
and that's all that can be selected from the viewport, so you can either Ctrl+A or window the objects, is this
what you had in mind ?

-

Hi Danny,

> I see the logic, but seems a bit cumbersome for the filtering system.

Yeah, it's kind of an early attempt, I don't think it will remain that way for the long run.


> This sounds better, I'm picturing something like you tick or pick
> type (say curve) and the colour from the filter

The way I was thinking, if you picked the "Set filter" off of the Types section, then it would allow you to check off styles for the filter. If you picked "Set filter" off of the Styles section, then it would let you check off the various Types for that section's filter.

So it would be like allowing you to apply a constraint from a different section to that section's controls.


> and that's all that can be selected from the viewport, so you
> can either Ctrl+A or window the objects, is this
> what you had in mind ?

Well, I've thought about that before some too, but that wasn't what I was thinking for this particular thing - what I was thinking here was to filter the controls in the scene browser. So you could narrow down what clicking on the "Style=Red" eye would do, instead of it hiding all Red things, if you had set a filter you could make it only hide Red curves for example. That narrowing would apply to any of the scene browser actions like hiding, locking, selecting.

But it would be for controlling the scene browser controls, not necessarily other things like viewport picking or Ctrl+A.... Maybe it could be combined with that though.


A different way that I've also thought some about would be to have some method of marking a scene browser item to make it an active filter, that would be more like trying to incorporate the checkbox more directly into the scene browser controls themselves.... Still not sure exactly how that would work out though.

- Michael

I get you Michael, incorporating the scene browser items together with a filter switch is a great idea! saves you from opening a separate section to apply a filter.

Cheers