Is there a way to select concealed objects in Rhino OSX?

Rhino Rhino for Mac
1

Not hidden stuff, simply anything that is concealed by another polysurface for example. Or, alternatively, is there a way to only select things that the rays from the camera touch, such that I could then hide these superficial elements and then manage the internal not-visible stuff?

The reason I’m looking into this is I’m making some models that currently have a lot of internal geometry in the form of closed polysurfaces – but I don’t always need that internal stuff to be there and it slows down my computer like crazy. So if I could somehow only keep what is visible to the camera from the outside, that would be awesome.

If this still doesn’t make sense, imagine a cube made out of 27 smaller cubes arranged 3x3x3. The command or process that I am hoping for would essentially allow me to select either just the hidden cube in the center of this 3x3x3 stack, or just select the 26 cubes on the outside that are visible to the camera.

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You can select objects like that in wireframe mode. I am not sure if that helps you 3x3x3 example, it may get tricky to see which is which object. i think it also works in ghosted, but I don’t use ghosted much.

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Thanks rhinorudi, I guess what I’m looking for is if anyone knows of a way to execute this automatically rather than manually. Maybe there’s a way in Grasshopper but alas, that isn’t out for OSX (yet?)

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Probably your best bet for now is to use layers to organize your model in sections that you can turn on and off as needed.

-Pascal

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Thanks pascal – but you gotta admit: a command like the one I am describing would be nice, right? =)

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FWIW, see this category:

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I often encounter the same.

  • work extensively in layers

Some objects will be very complicated with lot’s of detailed structure within a single object (imagine a complicated heatsink with lots of detailed cooling fins and attachment details).

  • here I currently simply go “old school”:
  • have only the layers displayed I need.
  • explode the object you need to work on.
  • select manually all structures you do not want to see and hide them.
  • then work on the detail and after finishing simply show all hidden features and join again.

The process of exploding, selecting, hiding, … showing and re-joining usually takes only a few seconds.
This will mostly force you to work in surfaces though (needing to work in solids would add the extra step of creating "temporary filling objects which most often is slower than just working in surfaces for me).

Also working in wireframe view (and quickly switching between wireframe + shaded + ghosted view helps a lot to visualize and select the structures you want to work with but ignore the structures you don’t.

For this I have mapped these three views to: CMD+1 (wireframe) CMD+2 (shaded) CMD+3 (ghosted).
Bulk selecting of many objects is fastest and easiest in wireframe view, so I mostly use that.

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