Toggle visibility INSIDE grouped items

[Ceciliabr]

I don't think I have fully grasped all the subtleties of the comment hierarchy here yet. My intention was to comment upon mazoolas reply to me, but for some reason I can't get my comments to be addressed to the right person.

Well...

[hansmex]

@Cecilia
This comment is for you.

@okh
And guess who this is adressed to.

[mazoola]

@Ceciliabr

I have so far never seen any trace of an object after applying this texture to it.

Nor have I seen a 'visible invisible' texture after applying a fully transparent PNG as a material -- but some folks have. My guess is, as OK said, it has to do with SunFlow's handling of surfaces -- which, my recent experiments suggest,* is a surprisingly complicated topic.

My suspicion, though, is that it has less to do with calculation of surface normals than with glossiness; that is, I suspect a glossy invisible surface, besides being an oxymoron, would be more likely to display artifacts than a matte invisible surface. Applying an invisible texture to an entire object might also lead to different results than applying the same texture to individual components of the object.

All this is pure speculation, though, as I've not tested my hypotheses -- something I'll no doubt do the next time I have something far more important to put off doing. [;)]

Maz
__________
* I should note in passing it was your recent post that sent me down that particular rabbit hole. While for most of my life I made my living as a technologist of some stripe -- and even once contributed about half the pages to a book on programming in Pascal, available in English and German wherever painfully obsolete computer texts are found -- I'm actually an English baccalaureate whose last math or science class was in high school; I'm definitely, as the idiom has it, 'punching above my weight.'

[Ceciliabr]

@hansmex

Of course... writing the address. Why didn't I think of that?

And the "quick reply"- button must be for people with great haste – but you still have to write the address – right?

I think I've got it now...

[Bilfrost]

Hi y'all. I know I am replying to an ancient thread here.... but have been struggling with this visibility issue for a while.

My particular situation:
- I have various objects grouped together for logical reasons (eg. a stack of kitchen cabinets)
- I want to make a change to a bottom cabinet. On my outline, I cannot access it. Of course, I can select the piece of furniture in the list and manually enter the things i want to change about it; but I cannot see these changes
- my workaround has been to ungroup the items, hide the top pieces until the one I want to work on is visible, make the changes, and then group everything back up together.

It seems like this would be much easier if I could just hide things within a group.

[Hecatoncheir]

Basically necroing this just like Bilfrost did last year, but I'm also a bit puzzled by how to work effectively with this limitation.

Am I right in saying that the reason it's complex is that grouping isn't just a way to organise the object list but it's also affecting placement rules when moving things about? And I guess that's the same reason we appear to be limited in how many levels we can have?

Is there a better way to organise a hierarchy of objects by levels and rooms then that makes up for this? Like Bilfrost I'm often dragging stuff out of the group it belongs to in order to toggle visibility now.

[A.D.STUDIO]

I'd *really* like to see this happen. There are so many occasions when I need to hide items inside a group, and moving them out is messy.

[A.D.STUDIO]

@ Puybaret

Maybe I could display invisible objects of a visible group with a surrounding box drawn with a very light gray? I'm going to see how it could look like.

Yes please! The group should continue to behave the same way, even with invisible objects inside it.

If you make all objects of a group invisible, should this group be automatically considered as invisible in the furniture list too (keep in mind that the group may be collapsed in the list)?

Yes

When you toggle the visibility of a group itself, should it change the visibility of all its child objects too?

Setting the group to invisible, regardless of the states of its child objects, should make the group invisible and grey out/make un-selectable the visibility checkboxes of the child objects (but leave them set as they were). Toggling the group back to visible would simply reinstate the visibility arrangement of the child objects and make the checkboxes editable again.

With thanks.

[A.D.STUDIO]

Given my other thread on this topic was closed, let's continue the discussion here