DS4 doesn't save visbility of surfaces in Polygon Group Editor to scene file

cwichura

I'm using the current release of DS4 Pro. (Can't try 4.5 since I do all my rendering with Reality, which doesn't support 4.5 yet.)

The Polygon Group Editor has a visibility toggle for each surface on an object. When using Reality, this is preferable to setting the Opacity to 0 on the surface, since it prevents Studio from exporting the geometry for the surface to Reality. And this is very important, since even geometry set to Lux's null material can cause problems in renders. So you really need it to not be there, and turning off visibility of the surfaces in the PGE is a lot easier than manually editing the scene files generated by Reality to remove the loading of all the null shapes.

However, Studio does not appear to save the visibility setting of surfaces when the scene is saved. So if you have to reload it later, you then have to go back and turn off visibility of all the hidden surfaces via the PGE again. This is tedious and error prone, especially when using objects with many material zones, like the various body/supersuits. It would be much better if Studio saved this visibility setting, just as it does for the visibility of bones/nodes in the Scene tab.

Is this a bug or intended by design? If it's by design, what about adding a user preference to control this?

Richard Haseltine

I suspect this is by design - the hiding is an aid to selection. You could create a new materials, then use the material (in Tool settings) to quickly reselect and hide the polygons. Even if it is this way by design there's no reason you shouldn't make (or add to) a feature request to have the visibility state saved.