How to hide stuff that is not independently selectable for hiding?

mambanegra

I would like to render the interior of the Roland car, but the outside of the car (windows and body) are all part of the interior. The only stuff that I can "hide" by unchecking the "eyeball" in the scene view is stuff that is moveable like doors and needles. 

Is there a way to selectively hide stuff that is grouped together? I really just want the seats and maybe the steering wheel to give the impression of two people talking inside a car and I don't want to deal with reflections from the windshield or the extra stuff associated with the body. 

Richard Haseltine

You can use the Geometry Editor tool to select the areas you want hidden (in this case you could probably do most of the work using the lists in the Tool Settinsg pane, then right-click in the Viewport>Geometry Visibility>Hide Selected. The hiddens tate won't save with the scene, so if it's awkward to grab everything you might want, before hiding, to use Geometry Assignment>Create Selection Set From Selected to create a single Selection Set entry in the Tool Settings pane, so you can reselect with one click and hide before rendering.

MaxHancock

You might want to look into using a Section Plane Node, which lets you cutaway walls so that you can render interiors.  

Here's a tutorial I found that talks about it: 

https://www.deviantart.com/slimmckenzie/journal/Tutorial-Iray-Section-Plane-Node-beginner-661286658

 

 

Mattymanx

are the surfaces seperated?  You can shut off the opacity of the surfaces you dont want.  If its being rendered in Iray, its best to apply a simple single color shader that wipes out all the maps.  You will want to make sure the gloss is off as well for the surfaces you want hidden.  if you dont, there will be a small hint of their excistance.

mambanegra

Mattymanx said:

are the surfaces seperated?  You can shut off the opacity of the surfaces you dont want.  If its being rendered in Iray, its best to apply a simple single color shader that wipes out all the maps.  You will want to make sure the gloss is off as well for the surfaces you want hidden.  if you dont, there will be a small hint of their excistance.

Wow, I'm a total goofball. It never occured to me that I could apply simple materials and then change the transparency. I don't understand iray material settings well enough to recognize how to hide the stuff that's there. 

@Richard -- This was exactly what I was hoping for, but didn't know how to do it. I will play around and see if I can figure that out. 

@ MaxHancock -- Woohoo! This is the best option altogether. By rotating a second plane in the opposite direction, I can eliminate the rear window (and stuff) creating a relatively minimal environment to render in. The goal is more illustrative than realism, so I want the impression that the two characters are in a car on the road, but I don't really have the computational power to render the entire thing, especially with stuff outside the car. So, assuming I can orient the plane such that my characters aren't sliced, this is exactly what I want! 

Thanks so much you all! (no clue why I didn't get the email letting me know people responded...)

Mattymanx

Opacity is the setting in the iray shader that will make it invisable.

mambanegra

Mattymanx said:

Opacity is the setting in the iray shader that will make it invisable.

Cool! Thanks for the tip!

I started with MaxHancock's idea, but the car isn't very square, so I either chopped fingers/legs off, or I left too much of the car. So, what I ended up doing was use Richard's approach, which allows you to select geometry based on textures as well as various other mechanisms. And, you can actually have it delete the mesh that is hidden, which means I will be able to create an interior only version once I get the actual selections down pat. 

Thanks everyone for the tips!