What do you expect to see in V7 before it’s ship-ready?

But they are investing into Rhino Inside, so… :man_shrugging:t3:

The nature of my work has rarely had to repeat more than 2 parts. Assembly parts are generally unique designs.

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Here we are talking about all these fancy things and all I want is to be able to expand a Layer in the Layers panel and see and be able to select the actual objects in that layer.

But hey, I bet someone new to Rhino REALLY appreciates those gradient hatches when getting to know the software…

Right click on the top level layer and choose Select Subobjects?

I think he means seeing the layer’s contents listed. Like in Illustrator, or the old Plugin ‘Object Lister’, by Brian Perry. Remember that?

I guess such listings require objects having meaningful names?

I wish Rhino had an ObjectBrowser (invokable also from the layer panel) looking much like the Bongo ObjectBrowser, which also allows direct editing for renaming the “object 1”, “object 2” default object names into more meaningful names.

Edit: Just saw a related post: Proposal: Named Objects Panel - #13 by seltzdesign
What amazes me is that Bongo actually already has this ObjectBrowser, but it’s not available to all Rhino users… :thinking:

// Rolf

Yes, I am aware of that. But that is selecting and seeing in the Viewport, not the Panel. The advantage to seeing it in the panel is that I can still see the object in the list even if it is hidden.

So yes, an object outliner. Like in 3DS Max, Cinema4D, Maya, … well… all of them… except Rhino.

Not really. They all have a GUID in the background anyways. So if it is not named it could for example just have Type as its name, since the names don’t have to be unique anyways. Or you just do automatic numbering. But of course giving something names doesn’t really make sense right now, since you don’t really see that anywhere. Same goes for groups.

A good example that shows the drawbacks of not having an object outliner: Vray for Rhino. They had to build their own assett manager (which does the same as an outliner normally), just because Rhino doesn’t have one. They use the Rhino sun, Environment even Cameras but needed to add the Assett Manager so you can actually select stuff. If Rhino had an outliner then you could add lights and cameras to layers and you know, do all this normal 3D sort of stuff, whcih is really awkward right now.

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Well, of course listings in Rhino doesn’t “technically” require “meaningful names” ( = human readable names), but Guids are not human readable, at least not with my short memory I could never associate a visible object with a Guid and then remember which object it was by seeing only the Guid in a list. I’m sure most people wouldn’t either. Well, that’s what I meant with “meaningful names” in an human readable object list.

Guids are useless as “names” for direct user interaction.

// Rolf

Perhaps having a thumbnail pops up when hovering over the object name…?

Akash

SketchUp, Illustrator, Blender,…
I would love to have an outliner in Rhino, I really miss SketchUp’s outliner in Rhino.
With an outliner you can do many things as moving objects inside groups/blocks or copy/paste. And because you can see the structure of your file from it you are less dependent of layers.
It’s one of those thing that if you have never used it before you won’t miss it, but the minute you discover it, you will heavily rely on it.

Yes, absolutely. But I mean since they have an unique ID in the background, there is nothing wrong with just naming something “Mesh” or “Surface” or “Group” in an outliner. You can rename it to something unique. Multiple different meshes could just all be named “Mesh” till they are renamed. Layer names all have to be unique, but objects don’t have to have that limitation.

I’ll add: even an outliner that just showed GUIDs as names would be more useful than no outliner at all :joy:

Certainly true, but in the absence of a more descriptive user-supplied name it would only be necessary for Rhino to label the object with the object type appended with a creation-sequential number and build in the capability to change the object color in the viewports whenever the mouse hovers over it’s name in the “outliner”. Also handy would be a unique text color for the name to represent that the object is hidden in the viewports at the moment. Or maybe even better would be to unhide it while the cursor is on it’s name and reserve the unique text color for the case where the object is out of all viewports.

I presume that thumbnails would be very storage intensive if generated at creation and compute intensive if updated when modified. Same if generated at hover time for each line hovered over. On the other hand, if the object is not within any viewports it might be useful to popup a tooltip with the location of the bounding box center.

I’m pretty sure that this was suggested a long time ago in the days of the old e-mail forum.

Absolutely. At least it has some “human readable” meaning.

I absolutely agree. At least it has some “human readable” meaning. But as said, GUID’s doesn’t. And I think that was also my point.

I also pointed out that Bongo ObjectBrowser is something that already exist (well, in Bongo), and addressing the problem I mentioned (having a meaningful name) it does exactly what we said above (except for “Object 1” is perhaps not as meaningful as “Curve 1” and “Surface 2”, but we are essentially on the same page if at least giving objects a name other than the GUID… :sunglasses: )

So, add the Bongo ObjectBrowser to Rhino, use Object Type + creation Number as default name for objects, and off we go.

// Rolf

I think it would also be extremely handy for the browser have a builtin rename capability, a delete capability, and the ability to sort the list within each layer with retention of the sort order.

I used to wish for this too, but how should this handle a file with 100 000 objects?

Unless it cuts through that like a hot knife in butter, it should not be implement imo :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

How does sketchup handle massive data in layers?

Not sure what you mean by “this”. The whole concept of a browser to list the objects in a layer, or just one of the many features discussed which such a browser “should” have?

Database-based application with full-text search. Been talking about this for years.

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It shouldn’t be any problem to filter the data so that only the objects that fit the visible area of a UI window (for the data grid) is retrived and shown, and as you scroll down the list you update the data retrieval filter. This is how you handle the viewing of data tables containing “zillions” of data items in business systems as well.

// Rolf

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I understand that handling the data is not a problem, but making the data usable for users is equally important. If I expand a layer with 2000 objects it would be difficult to find an object there as well. So I think it would need some good thinking and not just implement an “Illustrator” version or a Cinema4D version that is suitable for a few houndred objects.
That’s all :slight_smile:
I’d love to see a smart implementation though!!!

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I meant expandable layer with all objects visible. Scrolling through a list with thousand of objects would be of little use. (But of GREAT use if it only has 10-100 objects)

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