Undesirable/buggy layer visibility behavior in Rhino 5, SR14

Rhino Rhino for Windows
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1

I am attaching an animated GIF showing undesirable Layer visibility behavior (and at least one bug) in normal Rhino 5 (SR14) operation, in a situation where you have parent layers and sublayers.

A few things to note:

  1. Start with all layers ON. Turn off the visibility of a parent layer. You will see the persistent visibility of sublayers, as it should be.
  2. Set one of the sublayers as Current layer. First of all, I would expect that clicking into a sublayer would automatically turn on the visibility of the parent layer, and therefore all of its children would display their persistent visibility. I understand that this is more of a “peeking” paradigm, where you just want to operate on that single layer. The problem is that what happns next seems to indicate that all of this is buggy, rather than intentional. See 3).
  3. This is where it gets funky. Turn on the visibility of the parent layer. Error dialogue (BUG), you can’t turn off the visibility of the current layer. Excuse me? I’m turning ON the visibility of the parent layer, not turning anything off. Moreover, none of the other sublayers update their visibility settings, they show half lightbulb (BUG). That is wrong; it’s as if the layers still believe that the parent layer is not visible.
  4. Click one of the sublayers. It will adjust its persistent visibility setting, not turn it on.
  5. Set an unrelated layer to Current.
  6. Turn off visibility on parent layer.
  7. Turn on visibility of parent layer – finally, all sublayers are back to normal.

I believe this buggy, undesirable behavior stems from the failure to set the current layer’s parent to active on Current event.

For another example, see here:

  1. Start with all layers ON. Turn off the visibility of a parent layer. You will see the persistent visibility of sublayers, as it should be.
  2. Set one of the sublayers as Current layer.
  3. Set an unrelated layer as Current layer. The affected sublayer is now fully visible despite parent layer being off. (BUG)
  4. Turn off the affected sublayer. It turns off. Meanwhile, the parent layer turns on. (BUG)
  5. Turn off the parent layer.
  6. Turn on the parent layer; finally, sublayers are back to normal, except for affected sublayer, which remains off (because presumably, when you turned it off before it did not adjust it’s visibility but its persistent visibility).

These behaviors have been replicated on other machines.

Thanks,
Marc

2

Hi Marc- I see this, thanks. This works better in V6/WIP but the other sibling layers are not turned on when the parent is forced on by a sub layer being made current. We’ll fix it, thanks.
https://mcneel.myjetbrains.com/youtrack/issue/RH-40358
-Pascal

3

Great –

I notice the issue is logged for Rhino 6. Are you also able to fix in 5? We have hundreds of users in 5 and I am building a production tool. I am working around this by managing the visibility of all the sublayers manually, but it would be great to have this working not just in my GH plugin but in general Rhino 5 use.

Thanks!

Marc

4

Hi Marc- we are not planning any more service releases for V5, I’m afraid - all hands are working toward a V6 release.

-Pascal