Presets for selecting Hirarchy level, tool settings

[werner.poetzelberger]

When selecting an object, its sometime very practical, to not select the mesh, but a higher level object.

Simple example... I want to move the character  (Summer ..... ) rather than the mesh below.

When selecting the 'character' via the viewport it basically selects the mesh. 

It would be great, to have the possibility to preset and option for this: e.g: select highest level, select level 4, select hightes -3, etc. somehow a clever system.

(Tool settings...)

I work mostly by selecting in the viewport and basically have always a hirarchy.

Thx. Best.W.

[Amerio.Stephane]

I agree, this would be a useful feature! An implementation could be to add a "Preempt viewport selection" checkbox in the Common section of Nodes. When a mesh is clicked on in the viewport, you could look recursively up in the hierarchy and select the first node with preempt checked, or just the clicked mesh if none was found (the default).

[morbid]

Hello guys,

I'll add this in our feature request list. @Amerio.Stephane, sorry, I think I didn't get it. How should "Preempt viewport selection" work? Should it highlight parent node? Could you please elaborate?

Thanks.

[Amerio.Stephane]

Suggestion 1:

In the Common sectionadd a checkbox "Preempt view selection", below "Updated Last" for example. This checkbox should be unchecked by default. Now let's say you have a hierarchy of nodes named "Parent "with a child "Child", itself with a child "subchild" . By default, clicking in the viewport on subchild's mesh would select subchild. But if you checked "Preempt" on "Parent", then Parent would get the focus and be selected instead of SubChild. Of course, selecting subchild in the treeview must still select subchild! Now, maybe nodes with "Preempt" should also be displayed with some kind of special mark in the treeview (italic? underlined?).   

 

Suggestion 2:

In the treeview, add a column with a "pointing mouse cursor" (the arrow) that can be toggled on/off per node (see for example the Blender outliner interface)Here for example, SubChild cannot be selected in the viewport but Parent and Child can. You can imagine that now clicking in SubChild could select the first parent that can actually be selected (note that Blender does not work like that, it just prevents the selection altogether).

 

The second suggestion may be more intuitive to the end user, and more "readable", but for large hierarchy the first suggestion is easier to put in place (eg. when importing a model with a lot of subparts). Surely these two proposition could be mixed, or rearranged :)

Edited December 10, 2019 by Amerio.Stephane

[werner.poetzelberger]

The idea of 'selectable in viewport' is a good one.

It makes sense as a per-node property, but it has to editable in the Hirarchy. - multiple selection on/off etc. and the status has to be visible. -  use colors and icons!

Then the selection would move one layer up and check if this object is selectable and so on.

Edited December 10, 2019 by werner.poetzelberger