So I’m looking to find something like 3ds layers sets… named positions is pretty close but not exactly.
What do you want it to do?
So this is about importing into max and a bit about workflow, feel free to comment on either as well as the command.
This is a description of our design prototyping stage. So we tend to divide parts of the building in areas: one layer for this part of the facade, another layer for the garage, with several sublayers as options for every "area"of the building. With this layer hierarchy, I can, for instance, combine garage option 2 with facade option 1 and then quickly switch to a different garage option. It’a bit like design options in Revit.
The downside to this is that sometimes we might want to select all the objects with the same material: ei all the glazing and this glazing exists in several layers. Now that I’ve played a bit, I think that named positions is pretty close to what we want. I can still select individual objects, unlike groups, and quickly add or take away from these selections.
My real problem is exporting to 3ds, but I’ve already made a different thread for that. In this case, when we export as dwg (the best format so far) we lose the selection sets and groups. Which is annoying as everything in a layer is now a single 3ds object which means we have to go through and select sub-object elements and redo the selection sets.
Hi Jean,
Sorry for the late reply - xmas and all that.
I don’t own max but I’ve had to work closely with others who were importing my models for product animations etc so I can’t check those things myself. I seem to remember iges being their format of choice which enabled them to add all the layered effect to the object without just importing a basic mesh with no editablity.
As for the selection option in Rhino - can you use _SelMaterialName ? As long as all your layers are visible you should be able to select everything which is ‘glass’ etc.
I’ll ask my mate what we did for a Panasonic job a couple of years ago. I’m pretty sure it was iges. We were able to work it out as a later sculptural project we worked on together needed over 600 rods that had over 2000 items distributed on them, all different material types on different layers. It may have been the colours that differentiated each group, not the layer names but i’ll ask.
I hope you got it sorted.
Andy
Thanks 2dCube,
Like I said, named positions is pretty close to what we want in terms of selection sets. I don’t have to assign material names using it.
I tried iges, ( including in layer setting) but unfortunately it didn’t work. The layers are still all over the place and I think it likely does a messy job of meshing. DWG, I think, is still the best bet.