This may be more of a rhetorical question pointing out the lack of discoverability, but in the case it isn’t, it really only applies to blocks (as far as I know). The idea being that a block is meant to behave as a singular thing that is the same everywhere, and you don’t have immediate access to the stuff inside that block; but there are times when you want the stuff inside the block to respond to changes made to the block itself (like you situation). For the stuff you want to pick up what is happening to the block (say applying a material by object, or it picking up a color by layer), you have change those objects to By Parent for the properties you want before it is put into the block. This can be it’s display / print color, material, linetype, and line weight.
What is handy about this system is it allows you to specify what in the block you want to change when the block changes, stuff that shouldn’t change no matter what happens to the block, stuff that should change by layer changes, or stuff that shouldn’t ever change no matter what. But yes, if it isn’t something you are familiar with, it isn’t easy to figure out how it works.
Yes it it. My complain is mostly that all along I had NO IDEA this was a block. Also when I drop a material to it, Rhino is lying to me giving me all the clues in its interface that the material is assigned, yet does not display it for rendering. This is a total fail.
…But if you want to talk Blocks functionality: I think there should be an easy way to apply material changes to all blocks vs. to a single instance. I think I know there’s away to do this currently, but for the life of me if you ask me how I could not figure it out again. It’s way too cryptic right now.
The fact that all The Esoterics and their mothers have a dedicated docked window/tab, but Block Manager doesn’t is not helping either. Not even a property button, I mean even a meatball has its own property button, come on!
Hi Andy,
Just came back to this thread. First off thanks for answering. Sorry about not posting I guess once bitten twice shy. I’ll try again and see what happens I gave up for a while here as I had to get work done for a project. I’m used to using Rhino wips/betas all these years without many problems. I’ll keep trying the wip and see what I find.
Thanks again, a reply is worth it’s weight in gold.
RM.
This should be on the wall of every developers office in big bold letters.
And the software should regularly and frequently be put in front of groups of non-developer users and their comments should steer the development of the UI
Further, the developers should know what programs are ‘best in class’ for the features they’re working on and be familiar with them.
I use the UV tools regularly in V5 and daily wish they had the sophistication of modo’s UV tools. I’m hoping for improvements in V6.
