"In MoI I've been hoping so far to avoid those kinds of potentially confusing situations by keeping things simple and not having a sort of parallel material system to the layer system with individual override settings also thrown in as well.
Maybe in the future I will revisit that and see about adding in per-object overrides but I'm pretty sure that it would be better to work on some other organization mechanisms like hierarchical groups first to see if those used in parallel with styles will provide the kind of additional organization tools that you would need rather than some kind of parallel layers/materials/individual object override type system.
- Michael"
In the following please exchange group for layer or whatever other word you want to call it.
I complete agree here, keeping things as flat as possible is ideal, and per-object overrides sound messy. I'm using MOI 3D for designing interfaces for audio equipment and there are a lot of text labels. Currently these are all assigned to the same style, but I have to be careful to select each individual letter when moving words, which isn't ideal since I think of words as a single object.
Some form of grouping would be really helpful. I think it is nice to be able to keep things flat as well, so each group could have an option to either be linked / unlinked / locked / unlocked (whatever you want to call it), so that you can still easily move individual elements in the group, but also if it is locked move all elements together no matter which you select. Being able to have sub groups would also be very useful, this would allow switching of visibility between collections of objects possible, while still retaining their individual object names and styles.
By default when a group is created a bounding box and centre can be automatically computed, but being able to edit / reset these would be handy. That way for an oddly shaped word the I could manually position the actual visual centre (not the mathematical one) so that when I do something like a vertical centre alignment with another object it gets it will work without me having to manually re-position it just right.
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