Im a carpenter and I often use Rhino to mock up parts of my build projects. Most of what I’m doing is essentially creating rectangular polysurfaces (timber framing, sheet material, columns etc) and placing them together. So often I need to just select a surface (the end of a piece of framing timber say..) to move it or stretch it or push/pull it to touch it to another piece of framing but the surface I want to move is hidden behind another object.
For example in the image below, say I want to push/pull the end of the piece that is protruding into the other so its sits flush with the edge…
I could hold alt / option (Mac) and drag a sub object selection box over the end but often there are other things in the selection that unintentionally get picked up…
In sketchup one would double click to enter the object (group) so only that object can be manipulated, in rhino there is no such thing (ok there is but Im not going to group every piece of framing object and then run the command edit group!)
Even going into ghosted mode push/pull won’t allow for selecting hidden (but visible) surfaces.
Scaling 1d would require way too many clicks and if its a long piece of timber I’d have to move way down to the other end to start the scale.
use cmd shift (if you are using a mac, for pc it would be ctrl shift) and make a selection rectangular with the mouse by clicking and dragging, it is called subselect. you can also select faces like that (If they are visible), edges or vertices by cmd shift and clicking them. in wire mode you can do both operations by cmd shift clicking an edge it will prompt then which one to select.
Working in a similar field as user3134, I’ve often encountered this same scenario. Subobject select usually only gets you so far. I generally find myself selecting the object with the obscured face, running command “isolate”, subobject selecting the face I need to manipulate, running “unisolate” and then preforming the desired operation to that face. I imagine there’s a more elegant/faster approach but I’m currently unaware of one.
i usually also go into an ortho view and use subselect to move the geometry if you know what you are doing which is very fast and precise method, i never use push pull in that sense, that was also one command which got introduced to make rhino feel more like sketchup for those migrating, for the most part it seems like a redundant tool in rhino
Yeah I find myself having to go with that solution at times. The problem is that by isolating to get to the geometry you need to get to you loose the other objects that you are trying to marry that bit of geometry up to. grrrrrrr
yeah, an ortho view often does not work because the part you are working on is not on the outside of the model. ie other shit is just in the way. cheers
Hi 3134 -
In Ghosted mode, you can sub-object select an edge of an obscured object. You will then be asked if you want the edge or one of the two surfaces that are on that edge. Then pick the surface you need.
Apart from that, you can always quickly switch to Wireframe and back.
-wim
Hello, you can use the plugin “blockeditnew”, will make your life around 80 times better if you are coming from skp (as I am). (auto isolate groups by double clicking, don’t forget to add an alias to relocategumball and snappy/ smooth gumball and you are good!) Enjoy
