Other CAD software, SketchUp compared to Rhino

RH-1045 is fixed in Rhino WIP

With that plugin, you can work with grouped geometry in a similar way as BlockEdit in the WIP.

as in- you can double click a group and it isolates the geometry and effectively ungroups everything while in this mode.. make your edits as if nothing is grouped.. then when exiting, everything is grouped again.

As far as specifically editing blocks goes, something that’s nice in the plugin is you can double-click blank space to get out of the editing mode. In the WIP, the only way to get out of it is to click the apply button. (unless I’m missing something)

Hi Jeff -

As per RH-1045, you can now use the PickingIgnoresGrouping command to enable/disable/toggle the grouping behavior.
As I wrote in that ticket, I don’t completely understand what @dale meant with his comment about the double-clicking. Perhaps he will modify the BlockEdit plug-in to also detect groups and use this new command to allow editing groups…
-wim

RH-1045 is fixed in Rhino WIP

Just in case anyone actually tries this…
That’s a rather silly reply from the automated system.
The command that was added in last week’s public release has been removed again.
I’m told that users already have enough ways to select objects in groups.
-wim

Specifically, Ctrl+Shift (Windows) or Cmd+Shift (Mac) lets you do this already.

I downloaded the NewBlock Edit and love it! In the past I tried downloading it and I wasn’t able to get it running but now that it’s on the package manager its exactly what I wanted.

  1. Double click to enter and exit the block
  2. Edit groups like blocks after double clicking on them
  3. Ability to hide everything outside of the block for better viewing
  4. Added or removing items while inside the block
  5. Double click to edit nested blocks

My only wish is the options to edit the block in their original orientation (the block definition)…this would behave more like solidworks…and dynamic blocks but that’s another story.

I’m told that users already have enough ways to select objects in groups.

Specifically, Ctrl+Shift (Windows) or Cmd+Shift (Mac) lets you do this already.

So which other ways other than this one?

Ctrl+Shift is highly insufficient and insanely inefficient way to work with groups.

There’s also no way to select a nested group. What I did in the past was: Select a group. Isolate. Ungroup. Select a nested group. Isolate lock. Ungroup. Select a nested group. Do what I want to do with it (eg. edit the overall dimensions or use sub-object editing across the objects in the group or take a screenshot or generate a 2D drawing or paste/create a new object within the group or whatever). Select all. Group. Unisolate lock. Select all. Group. Unisolate. Done.

With the new plugin, it’s: Double click a group. Double click a nested group. Select a nested group. Do what I need to do with it. Double click in blank space twice. Done.

It speeds up things SO MUCH. Especially if I need to enter different groups over and over again. I can’t really explain how many different things the plugin makes incredibly more convenient.

Note that in the first case without the plugin, I already ran out of things I can do to temporarily ungroup nested groups and be able to reconstruct the group structure easily. With more levels of nesting, there’s simply no way to do it without having to just ungroup all and then tediously recreate all the groups from scratch. With that plugin, there’s no such limit.

So, do you really think that Ctrl+Shift is enough? Especially since it also collides with sub-object selection, so actually selecting an entire object, let alone multiple of them within the group is a already a pain even without any nesting involved. Yes, you can mess with the filters to be able to only select whole objects but that’s hardly convenient.

Also note that the original suggestion in RH-1045 does not solve the nesting problem either. This really is an entirely different request.

RH-30230 is fixed in Rhino WIP