(hide) items in the Scene pane. Possible?

Griffin Avid

Sometimes when a scene has MANY items/objects, it can difficult to navigate the list.

Any way to hide items from the scene tab/pane without deleting them from the scene?

There's a workaround, which is to group items together, but that too, can be problematic..

Syrus_Dante

You can use the search filter on top of the scene pane. Maybe change item names (add tags like Character - Prop - Environment or something to it) to make better use of the filter.

sriesch

Out of curiosity, how is the grouping of items problematic?

Griffin Avid

1) Ungrouping by dragging items seems to sometimes screw up the heirarchy and objects tend to lost their parents and child status.

2) Leads to mistakes where figures verse hips get acted upon (for poses and sometimes targeted selections)

3) I STILL need to expand the full list to find root figure and sometimes accesssories.

4) Once grouped, certain items no longer show up in scene list and need to be selected in the viewport.

5) It can difficult to catch every part in order to make a group. Requires a fully "expand from selected" to make sure. I've missed a prop before and I've had groups within groups and it breaks the bounding box.

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I use it but always know for the wonderful things it does, there are a  few problems it can cause.

scorpio

Have you tried parenting things to a null?

Griffin Avid

Never even heard of that technique.

Logged into my hints and tips list, thanks

Syrus_Dante

I always using groups for scene management. Is there a difference or advantage in parenting something to a null instead of a group?

Of course except for the ability to show/hide every item parented to the group at once. I even create a group for every genesis character figure in the scene so I can hide/show it including the hair, clothes and things with one click. I also store diffrent lightning setups in groups so I can easily switch their visible parameter on and off with the little eye icon in front of the node title. Even my cameras as allways goes into my hidden "GRP_CAMs" group - so they are out of the way in the viewport.

If I create a new group while some items are selected in the scene I have the option to parent selected items automaticly to the new group. This is a usefull funktion but with a strange "feature" I dont like.

I mean somehow the newly ceated group seems to place itself at the center coordinates of all selected items I think - and therefore all parented items use this group center as the zero point for placement. But my intention for doing this was to have the group at the world center and use it as a container for scene management an still have my item placement values as I am used to - relative to the world center.

So to avoid this I create a default group at the world center and add items to it with the parent in place option - btw. I think the scene pane option menu shows a checkmark for parent items in place while using drag and drop.

Any way to hide items from the scene tab/pane without deleting them from the scene?

Yes you can - see the the scene pane option "Show" maybe uncheck everything except show objects. Could be usefull if you have a big environment scene with props/objects cluttered all over the place. If you allready had setup groups they show up too if items to show are parented. And if the scene pane is still overcrowded you could use the search filter text-box ontop.

I dont know how many objects you have in the scene untill you are loosing the overview.

If you want to go crazy on this maybe there is a way to open up the scene file in a text editor an search/replace item names called "node labels" there.

Griffin Avid

Will try this.

Thansk you for the deep help and screen shots. 

Syrus_Dante

avxp said:

2) Leads to mistakes where figures verse hips get acted upon (for poses and sometimes targeted selections)

Had to read this twice before I can guess now what you mean. With acted I think you mean animating the figures body and hip center.

I also had trouble with both of them if some poses gets loadet to some frames in the timeline. So I once decided to have the body center of the figure always be zeroed in rotation and translation and now I use the figures group translation and y-rotation for the placement and orientation of the figure. And the figures hip animation is controlled by the pose.

To have the figures pose and animation always on ground level I use drop to ground Ctrl+D on the figure. I also think to remember I had a situation where I got problems with the grouping of the figure. Somehow the figure was floating around somwhere up above ground level if I used drop-to-ground. Then I found out that DazStudio looks for the lower most y-translation-positioned item in the group even if you just selected some figure or some object within the group and drops this group bounding box to the ground. You can easily forget this - especialy if the item is somewhere outside of the viewport or hidden but pareneted some time ago.

Because of this I take care of having all parented items in the group above ground level. But also other things could causing the problems with drop-to-ground on items and groups.

With drop-to-ground DazStudio first will set the center point of the item to ground level and then look if some geometry is below the ground level and translate it up untill the geometry is touching the ground.

In my content library I also found some free props as objects or figures with strange center point values. This means I had to fix this myself and setup the centerpoint - that is also called pivot-point - of these items with the joint editor tool settings to have it rotating around this corrected item center and this is not allways zero on the xyz axis. Instead it is loaded in - positioned and rotated - like it once was imported as a pure geometry data file into DazStudio. So you have to know there is a pivot-point called center-point that you can change on the fly with the joint editor tool but if you zero all xyz position values there you see the real center of the geomerty data stored in DazStudio. To change this simply position and maybe rotate the item in DazStudio how you like it and export it as obj and load it back into the scene with obj-import.

To have the feet with shoes on touching the ground I use dropping while the figure is unparented to anything. Maybe I fine tune the feet rotation for a better standing pose.

If I use this drop-to-ground method on the figure I now have a problem - bacause y-translation of the body gets set to ground level and also the hip is set to some height level so both are now controlling the figures above-ground level.

So I add or substract that diffrent y-translation value of the figure body to the hip y-translation position and zero the body y-translation.

Therfore I text select and copy the y-translation value from the figures body center in the parameters pane and zero this parameters value back to zero with Alt+LeftClick - this way I have it zeroed along all keyfames in the timeline range - just to make shure all poses there gets affected. Then I select the figures hip - text select the y-translation value there, press End on the keyboard to have the text cursor at the end and now I add the opposite leading sign of the body y-translation value which I had copyed before and paste it in behind and finaly let DazStudio do the the math within the parameters value text-box. How complicated - I wish I could have a script for doing that.

There is a method I use to avoid all these problems with the body center point I've descriped above.

Load your - by default zeroed figure - open up the joint editor - select the hip bone and copy the y-position value there. Then go to the parameters pane and paste this value into the y-translation parameter of the hip. Finaly add a minus leading sign to it - so now the hip center-point is on the same position as the world center then you can create a new parameter and ERC-Freeze that offset in there. With this new parameter the figure is - in default pose - half way below the ground but this way the body center is the same as the hip center. This offset can be realy usefull because now drop-to-ground always works and you dont have to care about the body center point anymore. Therefore you can select all translate and rotate parameters and lock them so they doesnt get changed by a loaded pose or by yourself anymore. Can also be handy to position the figure if maybe parented to something else. But you may say hey - if I save my pose now and want to use it elsewhere I have to make shure that this new offset parameter is presented in the figure and set to 1. To fix this use "Bake To Transforms" fist before saving the pose to the library. This will also zero all pose control values and transfers all the rotation values to the bone rotations only.

OK enougth sayed - and as always I hope that helps some people that may struggle with DazStudio because I bet nothing of this info is written down somewhere.