I hear your questions. But literally every other 3D Software has figured it out, so I am sure Rhino could too.
It does not have to be linked to Layers, it could just be a way to see all your objects, groups, blocks, etc.
What is the use? Well, simply another way of organizing and viewing your scene. It would help in naming groups and objects. That will help others viewing your scene.
I appreciate that this can be done in the viewport, but why restrict yourself to that, when having an Outliner is such a sensible way of going about it.
If it wasn’t sensible, then why do so many programs have it. And it’s not just 3D software. Every 2D Software out there (Adobe Illustrator, Affinity, Sketch, Figma) - every single one of them has an Outliner, even though you can theoretically do everything in the viewport. It just makes sense. It’s an overview of the contents of your scene.
That Object Manager from your Screenshot looks like it’s going in the right direction. Any ideas why it was scrapped again?
Probably the same thing that happens now when you have thousands of Sublayers. Why does having to solve for an edge-case invalidate any other benefits of it being there?
I don’t think it should replace the Layer panel. Make it separate. Then those that see the value can use that panel and those that don’t, don’t have to. Just like all the other obscure Panels that exist. But just because I don’t use them, doesn’t mean I should question their existence or point out in which edge-cases they don’t work.
Having many objects under a layer is not an edge case. I’ve had this in Affinity Designer, which shows each object in the layer panel. You need to scroll a while to even find the parent layer, to fold it, not see all the objects anymore but the layers. Like ‘collapse all’, in fact.
Anyway, an object manager is a good thing. Unfortunately, this prototype was removed again from the R8 WIP. It just needs enough features to be useful and not to slow down things.
Fair enough. In Affinity Designer, this happens quickly because you might have some vector graphic that contains lots of shapes. But these shapes are not distinct or named. If you are creating graphics in Affinity and have thousands of unnamed shapes in one layer, you have probably simply exploded a large graphic. Can’t you select all the objects in the viewport and group them together… you know, like you have to do in Rhino? Or you can select by certain filters, also like in Rhino. So in that sense Affinity Designers’ Object Manager was helpful, because even though you had to scroll a lot, you at least DO have another way of selecting things other than in the viewport. A luxury you don’t get in Rhino.
In Rhino or in fact in most 3D scenarios you have many parts but they can be named and grouped together. Like you build a house you wouldn’t have every object unnamed and just in one layer, you would group things together. A door might be made up of 50 objects, but you have them grouped as a door. Or you even turn it into a block, so it’s a contained unit.
Creating hierarchy is what helps in creating order. Sure, if you have a flat hierarchy of a thousand mixed and unnamed objects in one layer, then the Object Manager will be hard to use. If you group, name and block sensibly, it won’t be a big deal as long as you can collapse each group and layer. Then the object manager would be far superior to just seeing all the objects in the viewport and having to click on them to find the object you are after.
Either way, I agree that any efforts on some sort of Outliner/Object Manager should be separate from the existing Layers panel so as to not interfere with it. In fact it might even live outside the layers anyways, since I believe it would be more important to see and name Groups in an Object Manager and groups can contain objects from different layers. That is how Cinema4D for example does it as well.
A CAD style object manager would be quite useful to have, comparing it with DTP graphics programs is a bit skewed because these don’t work with named objects most of the time. The DTP graphics way of showing objects on a layer is not really useful, at least not to me.
Like @seltzdesign I think that it should be separate from the layers panel to avoid unnecessary complexity.
Regarding grouping or blocking things: definitely! However, in 2d cad plans (which are perfectly doable, too) you surely won’t give names to each and every line. Not even group them.
Regarding if it should be a different panel or not:
Like I tried to convey in this thread
one and the same panel could simply have filter settings for what should be displayed. Softimage XSI had this already, 20(!) years ago. You even could just hover the mouse over their panel and tap shortcut keys for these filters. Sometimes I wonder why things like this aren’t just state of the art for every 2d / 3d app out there. Everybody seems to re-invent the wheel over and over again.
That said, I am happy that R8 will have reworked panels/toolbars after all.
I’d say having an object manager and filtering IS pretty standard for 2D/3D software or can you think of one that doesn’t? I mean when even FreeCAD has it, but a >$1.000 software that is supposed to be able to read and write all those CAD files does not, that is pretty strange.
Absolutely. Actually in that thread you linked you show the UE4 Outliner with the live filtering. That is what we need! And you can actually also see in UE4 that Layers and the Outliner are 2 different panels. Both should have live filtering and of course retain their order. I mean filtering a list of nested objects is really not that difficult you would think.
Sure, Rhino and Nvidia Studio drivers all up to date. Doesn’t happen consistently though. It was more of a coincidence that it happened right after I read your post
hello everyone
i dont know if its too late to post this or if these posts are viewed by the devs or not but regardless here are my suggestions/wishes:
Gumball
when the gumball is set to align to local mode it resets to the world everytime you deselect the object which mean you will lose the object local pivot point after a transform if you deselect it which you will eventually and you will have to set it manually again after each transform if you want to your gumball to reflects the transforms.
you cant perform transforms on multiple selection from per object pivot. only by average pivot all objects.this gets annoying a lot when you want to rotate multiple object without the moving and staying fix at where they are and only rotate
Grasshopper
unreal engine node editor environment has two very hefty shortcuts which i think it should be a must for every node based editor First is that if you drag a wire from output of a node into a empty space and then release the mouse a pop up with all the nodes will appear (like in GH when you double click) what node you choose here will automatically will be piped into the first node you dragged out a wire from. it might be a little tricky to know at what input the output of the first node should be piped into if there are more then one input in the second node but i think its not so complicated to solve and it will saves a lot of time.
the Second shortcut is that if you press a key on keyboard the right click on canvas this will create a specific node for you. for example in unreal if you press M on keyboard and the right click on canvas it will give you multiply node this is a huge time saver.
Shortcuts
a lot of people here expressed that they would like direct shortcuts but were responded that it will break the command line. my suggestion is that you create a override for the command line which will disable it except for number inputs you need for commands and you map the override button to one of the function keys this way you will have the option to use alias if you want or direct shortcuts or both of them.
History Panel
as mentioned by others i think relaying on grasshopper for very simple parametric needs its very inefficient. it will go a long way if we could get some thing like modifier Stack in 3dsmax or blender or many other 3d software that use smt like this. of course what is important here is that the parameters of each command you done to a object is exposed and we are able to change them after the fact (some thing that you can not do with history as far i know) and not only a GUI. it would be amazing if you could change numbers of X Y Z or spacing in Array command after you execute it (i think there is a commercial plugin that does exactly this)
Rhino API
from rhino 6 after we could add materials to sub-object selections. this is great when you rendering arch stuff inside rhino but if you are useing third party Realtime rendering solutions like lumion or twinmotion/unreal the sub-object material does not carry over. not sure if its true or not but i was told by one of the devs of the datasmith plugin that this is a limitation of rhino’s api (?). this getting fix will save a lot of time for people in architecture.
the last item is not the case, and a good rule of thumb for determining things like this is to check whether the raytraced viewport supports it, since in theory any 3rd party renderer can do whatever raytraced can do, as they can use the same underlying mechanism to implement viewport rendering
@ari, what @jdhill says - Raytraced (and Rhino Render) are both implemented as plug-ins, using the same API any third-party developer can use. There is no secret under-the-counter access to data in any way. If Raytraced and Rhino Render can do it anyone can do it.
Rhino doesn’t really have a concept of object origins, all geometry is always in world space.
In Rhino 8 an object frame is being introduced, but it still isn’t the same as having an object origin around which geometry is located. Geometry is still in world space. I’m not sure what the current status is of that project and how it will evolve during this year. @andy would be the person who can tell you about that.
Blender imports USDZ fine, but there is no official exporter. Unless you know something which I don’t then animations are broke more than half the time in USDZ export with the plugin shared on Github.
