Hello!
How come such an interesting new feature is just announced as a little sidenote? This is great news!!
It’s not even in this changelist:
But maybe it’s because it’s not complete yet.
Thanks!
It is very much WIP and will probably change a lot, hence no real announcement. The current version is more like a proof of concept. There are bound to be bugs and missing things.
Hi Eugen -
That one is on the list as RH-66754.
I’ve created RH-66756 for that.
Could you provide some more information about this question?
-wim
How about CONNECTIONS?
Only announced by the icon on a side panels? Can you say a few words what can we expect from this tool?
Sounds like a good question for a new topic… (:
A context menu can hold all sorts of useful things (could even be configurable):
New, delete, duplicate, select layers (in the panel), select objects, … the usual.
Btw. icon’s aliasing is a little ‘unclean’. Maybe only seen in dark mode.
A general note:
This new Object Manager, in a way, ‘includes’ the Layer panel (and others), right? I believe you mentioned somewhere that the Layer panel, too, is re-written (or at least ETO-ified).
Can’t both be one and the same? Spare some work and go for a ‘unified’ solution?
A little inspiration, on that behalf: I used to work with Softimage XSI a few years, which had exactly this: a unified Scene Explorer, which could hold everything, the 3d scene, layers, materials, lights, passes…
You just needed to roll over the panel, and press any filter key (L for layers, S for scene root…), and there you go. There could also be many Explorers, each of which could be locked and used for drag&drop.
Why am I telling you this:
XSI’s UI was amazingly efficient and ‘compact’. Best in class (on top of being a brilliant animation program and very good poly modeller). Not because the UI had so many bells and whistles, but because it was so ‘generalized’ and logical. Cinema4D and Blender come close, but not really. Although XSI was for a different industry, many UI principles can of course be ‘laid over’ any other 2d or 3d application. They were really ahead of their time (still chucked in favor of Maya by Autodesk).
You might want to give it a thought to ‘generalize’ Rhino’s UI, too, one step at a time. Why are so many panels for different things necessary, when just one do-it-all-panel would suffice, and switching the ‘mode’ is just one tap on the keyboard? Since you are at it…
Thanks for reading!
We’ll be rolling out messages about major new features in January. Much of November and December was internal organizing to figure out what was going to be worked on.
The object manager may not become an official part of Rhino 8. That project is going to focus on being a new block manager panel for Rhino 8 and it would be good to put as much effort into making a useful block manager instead of trying to do everything all at once.
Nice!! Looking forward!
Why not consult us before launching a feature?
What are your criteria for knowing which functionality we will use and which functionality will not be useful to us?
Please search for block manager on this forum.
Sorry Steve, I don’t see the connection to my question.
We have to make a decision sooner or later on what to do. That decision is typically based on what we hear from the community. If you search for block manager on this forum, you will see that this is a hot topic for many users.
I forgot to mention something regarding this XSI explorer thing: it has a strict ‘coupling’ between what you select in a viewport and in the explorer. In other words, the text representation of an object (it’s name) in the explorer is the same thing as the 3d rep in the viewport. Select one rep and the other is selected, too.
I always found this a brilliant concept. Maybe worth thinking about.
This has been suggested many times in the past by many people including at least once by me back in the e-mail days before this forum. So it has certainly been floating around as an idea in Rhino land for a long time.
Just here to bump this Object Manager feature as well as the connections panel. Excited for further developments in both.
Would be awesome to have a nice block manager ! really looking forward for this one.
If it is possible to include a better management of linked files would be awesome !
Was the object manager removed again from the actual WIP-releases?
Hi Andreas -
Yes.
We will focus on that being a block manager in the first round.
-wim
So what are you saying? That all development will be focused on developing the way these managers will look and function via the block manager, but with a keen eye locked on making the object manager look and function the same??
And will the object manager be a few release candidates, a few releases or a few versions down the road?