Hi knightxor, yes the filtering system that I want to add in the future should work like you are asking about.
It will probably be a drop-down under the Select tab on the right side pane, the default will be "Auto" which will behave like the current system in V1 (one click to select whole object, second click to drill-in to an edge or a face), but you'll be able to set it to options like "Faces", "Edges", "Curves", etc...
But I didn't have time to implement this for version 1.0 though.
> It could be useful when you are working with only one object,so you don't
> have select solid first all the time just to select edge
Well, it is kind of a trade-off - instead of selecting the solid first all the time you will instead need to switch the mode all the time to do different things. So I don't really think it will be a speed up for just regular use.
MoI works quite a bit different than a polygon modeler - in a poly modeler you will likely stay in one of those modes for a longer time, like stay in vertex mode while you are tweaking the location of a bunch of individual vertices. In MoI with its different style toolset, you are much more likely to need to switch the filter more often. That's why the current method that lets you drill in with just a second click instead of setting a special mode (and unsetting it later) is so important, I wanted to get this style to work well first before relying on more specific filter modes.
> or maybe it's complicated object and you want to filter some selection possibilities.
This is definitely more what I think it will be useful for - to help with making more difficult selections where other stuff is getting in the way.
> I think it could be useful to have an option, when you disable history, to remove
> construct edges because for example you don't need them anymore and you don't
> want to clutter workspace with them.
Usually they are pretty easy to select since curves are targeted by the mouse first before solids are.
You can automate this with a keyboard shortcut script though - put this under a shortcut key:
code:
script:var gd = moi.geometryDatabase; var objs = gd.getSelectedObjects(); gd.deselectAll(); for ( var i = 0; i < objs.length; ++i ) { var parents = objs.item(i).getHistoryParents(); parents.setProperty( 'selected', true ); }
That will enable one keystroke to switch selection to all the objects that went in as input to the current object.
So for example if you created a loft through 10 curves, select the loft and use that shortcut and then selection will shift to the 10 original curves and you can delete them.
If you want to get rid of the construction geometry, it isn't really necessary to disable history on the object first, history only has an effect if you edit the original objects. You only really need to disable history if you want to edit those original curves for some other purpose like to construct a second object with them or something like that.
Hope this helps!
- Michael
