Feature request: detailed object properties as tab

Detailed object properties would be more useful if they were easier to access and updated on the fly.

To get the guid of an object, for instance, I need to highlight the object, go to the properties tab (if not already open), then click on “details”. A panel opens and data is displayed. While this panel is open I cannot do anything else.

Could this either be a separate tab or a sub-tab of “properties” (such as “material”)? I understand this involves dealing with multi-object selections etc but this is no different from what already happens in the “properties” tab.

+1

Like Alias’ Information Window. No more click fest in Rhino. Should be easy to implement.

@dgebreiter
Try Bubble for Rhino here-
http://www.asuni.com/portfolio/bubble-for-rhino/

A bit more convenient, but one can’t enter transformations etc. in these pop-ups, just see some info.

Hello - what would you expect to see there with multiple selections? Only common properties? We used to show, a long time ago, the full details, or at least a lot of them, on everything selected in Properties but that slowed down selection of many objects so much that we had do abandon that approach. No doubt it could be made smarter but between showing info only if one object selected and for all selected objects there needs to be some compromise, I guess. Do you typically only want the info for one object at a time?

-Pascal

Hi Pascal - It would be helpful to have degree and span information showing in the interface whenever you select a surface or a curve, and then have the ability to manipulate those values without having to type in “rebuild” or click to on icons before getting to the appropriate screen. This would be more informative and easier to use. More efficient.

1 Like

As far as multiple selections go, it is most useful to see, for example, co-ordinates of multiple CPs while establishing G2 or G3 continuity manually. Otherwise, it is rather single selection information that would be most useful. Having to go to Details every time really is extremely tedious. Or being able to simply, while in any tool, reparameterise curves and surfaces (change degree, spans, etc.).

You could just “copy” what Alias persistently displays, because also Rhino internally holds that information about each object, so that should require not much work at all.

Yes, got that - of course, displaying and setting are different beasts altogether - the original request here was for the info only, as I understood it. I do get the further request to be able to modify these too…

https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-44730
thanks!

-Pascal

Sure. Appreciated. Just, as a first step, having more information displayed persistently would be a great step forward, and the era of click-fests would at last be over : ;

Rhino internally has all that information. Let her show it to us : )

Also, with the object selected, type ‘wh’ and Enter/Spacebar then Esc when you’ve had your fill of info… baby steps.

-Pascal

Well initially I thought just to quickly get some more data with fewer clicks but now that you ask… :wink:

The way I do it for a tool I’ve written for post-processing structural analysis models is to select in a tree view multiple categories I am interested in. These are then listed in a table for selected objects which have this category, as read-only or modifiable values where applicable.

So, for instance the tree view could have a branch with common properties such as GUID, name or object type. Another branch could be geometric properties such as length or radius. A third could be topological data such as face or edge count.

So, imagine I select all categories in the above tree and then I select a circle and a mesh object.
The table could then look like this:

index, GUID, name , type, length, radius, face count, edge count
1 , XXXX, circle1, curve, 2*pi, 1.0, n/a, n/a
2 , XXXY, mesh1, mesh, n/a , n/a, 2 , 5

When I select/hover over a line in the table the object corresponding to this line is highlighted (differently from the standard selection highlight). I change a (non-read-only) value such as the name, the object gets updated. I can also export the table. I can also select objects in the model by entering values into the table (i.e. by pasting a list of object names or radii .The objects with this name/radius get selected).

Of course this could all be done in GH but this might be a quicker workflow.

I can upload a screenshot of the aforementioned tool when I get back to the office tomorrow. Come to think of it I guess I could update my tool to contain more Rhino-specific data but if there are more people who think this might be usful I guess McNeel is best placed to implement themselves?

Many thanks

Daniel

Yes, but that thing is hard to read and it is a modal window : (

Probably, why not? But not everyone wants to deploy GH just to see (and maybe in the future also change) information about an object displayed, information that Rhino already has about a selected or pinned object. As Pascal explained, it’s sort of already there, but it is displayed in a modal window and not too glanceable.

Hi everyone

I agree, this could be a useful information window/panel to have.

The “box edit” panel might help a bit. In here you have the “position” where you can control the z-value of a curve/point. It’s of course pretty simple, but works well for planar curves / point / surfaces.