Browser Selection

 From:  Michael Gibson
2604.8 In reply to 2604.7 
Hi Colin, well currently the sections that you can use are "Styles", "Types", and "Objects".

It sounded like styles made sense to you? Styles are basically for organizing objects into different colored categories, like you were mentioning this is the closest thing to layers that you are used to in Rhino.

The Types section is for doing an action on all objects of a particular type like "hide all curves", or "select all solids". One example of this is after you have built a few surfaces, you may notice that your viewport is pretty cluttered up with a lot of the input curves getting in the way. To hide those, you can go to the Types section, and click the eye icon for "Curves", which will hide all those curves. Or maybe you want to only see curves for some work on them - in that case go to Types and right-click on the eye icon for Curves. That will "isolate" the curves making them the only displayed thing and hiding everything else.

In Rhino there is a set of commands kind of similar to this, such as "SelCrv", "SelSrf", etc... , the Types section in MoI has similar functionality except it provides a few different kinds of actions like Hide/Show/Isolate/Select/Deselect , instead of only being a selection mechanism.


Then "Objects" is a list of all objects that you have assigned a name property to, so that you can refer back to it later on. If you don't care so much about differentiating an object by its color, you can instead just assign a name to it, and then later on hide, show, isolate, select, or deselect that object by using its entry in this section.


Basically though all the sections have a pretty simliar purpose - they are all for doing an action like hiding, showing, selecting, etc... on some defined set of objects.

If you don't have a very complex model, you may not really need to use any of this though, it's basically for when you start to notice that it is taking too much time to click on different pieces of things, or when there is quite a lot of stuff on the screen which is getting in your way and you would like to hide chunks of it with a few clicks, stuff like that.

Hope this helps to explain it a bit!

Also you don't necessarily have to use every section - there are some different sections to try and give you some flexibility and choice in how to organize things. If just one method of organization works fine for you then you can just work with that one section and you don't have to use the others.

- Michael