A wish for Rh6, and a workaround for RH5.
Starting from RH5: Since Rhino doesn’t provide with a Object Navigator (only Layers) while I so desperately need to be able to quickly pick objects, naming them and setting other properties, etc. So I decided that there is a Object Navigator anyway, although there isn’t one. I use a trick - Bongo.
Bongo has an object navigator (but it’s called Animation Manager). The term Manager hint’s at what such a thing is good for. Without one it’s difficult to manage stuff. Anyway, by using the Bongo Object Navigator I can see all the objects, I can organize them into hierarchies, and when clicking an object it get the focus in the Property Inspector. And that’s exactly what I want. THat’s how it should work.
I took a screenshot demonstrating how I use it (although normally using two screens):
How I get them objects into the navigator? I select all (CTRL-A), press “Animate”, change a value in any of the three motions (Move, Rotate or Scale), press Enter, then changing the value back to zero again, and Voila! All objects in the model are listed in the Object Navigator (Animation Manager).
Well, this is better than nothing anyway. And since you already have the navigator inhouse (Bongo), I suggest making it a standard option in RH(6) as well.
// Rolf
PS: (The model was downloaded from ABB-Robotics, but I spent an awful lot of time fixing some surfaces (naked edges) and preparing it for animation (for Bongo and Simlab). BTW, It seems like the model was made with Rhino, with its typical errors in the surface… 