Hide multiple nodes at once?

ttimm

Hello all, my second post here!  :)

First off, I am loving DAZ 3D as my first real venture into the 3D world (while piddling with 3DS MAX as well to learn how to model in general). I have been hard at work scouring Google for tutorials (which are hit and miss to be kind about it) and the forums here, (though I cannot for the life of me find a search bar for topics here) so if this has been asked before, please forgive me.

I am wondering about hiding multiple nodes at once in the scenes tab (or any other tab/"place" that I could achieve that with). For instance, I recently purchased a classroom environment, and when I highlight the parent and hide it, all of the children props are still visible. I doubt anyone needs me to explain how that affects things when you need to hide multiple nodes at once versus going through and manually cliking each and every node off when you need that, then on again when you need that, then off again at the point you need that again, and so on.

Is there a way to do this?

Thanks!

 

 

sriesch

    To toggle a bunch of nodes (to hide, or not cast shadows, etc.), select the root node you want to start from in the Scene Tab and right-click, then choose "Select Children".  Now you can toggle them all invisible simultaneously in Parameters tab—Display.  Just make sure you turn off both Visible and Visible In Render.

 

ttimm

Thanks so much! That was getting a tad time consuming :)

 

cwichura

I use the following script to toggle visibility of a node and all its children.  If you have some children nodes with a different visibility than the parent, this will be lost.

var startNode = Scene.getPrimarySelection();if ( startNode ) { var bNewVisibility; var nodes = [ startNode ]; nodes = nodes.concat( startNode.getNodeChildren( true ) ); if ( startNode.isVisible() ) {  bNewVisibility = false; } else {  bNewVisibility = true; } for ( var n = 0 ; n < nodes.length ; n++ ) {  nodes[ n ].setVisible( bNewVisibility ); }}

 

Another option to consider is liberal use of the 'Group' node.  If you parent items to a group node, when you toggle the group node, it will change the visibility of all children in the scene.  However, it doesn't actually change the visibility status of child items.  So if you've hidden a couple sub-items, you don't lose that when you toggle the group to invisible and later restore it.

StratDragon

sriesch said:

    To toggle a bunch of nodes (to hide, or not cast shadows, etc.), select the root node you want to start from in the Scene Tab and right-click, then choose "Select Children".  Now you can toggle them all invisible simultaneously in Parameters tab—Display.  Just make sure you turn off both Visible and Visible In Render.

 

sriesch said:

    To toggle a bunch of nodes (to hide, or not cast shadows, etc.), select the root node you want to start from in the Scene Tab and right-click, then choose "Select Children".  Now you can toggle them all invisible simultaneously in Parameters tab—Display.  Just make sure you turn off both Visible and Visible In Render.

 

not only does this method work well it allows you to quicky make invisibles of all parented props attached to the figure.

Padone

sriesch said:

    To toggle a bunch of nodes (to hide, or not cast shadows, etc.), select the root node you want to start from in the Scene Tab and right-click, then choose "Select Children".  Now you can toggle them all invisible simultaneously in Parameters tab—Display.  Just make sure you turn off both Visible and Visible In Render.

Yes, and this is rather counter-intuitive. In any other program around you will expect that hiding the parent hides the children too. Just simply as that. Anyway for the sake of completeness to anyone new here, the above method only works if "display separate items" is off in the parameters tab menu.

 

Richard Haseltine

I'm not sure about any other programme - Poser did it this way, which is probably why DS does too, for the ease of those who came over from Poser or used both. There are free scripts to hide the selected node and all of its children, as I recall, which would give you the behaviour you expected.

chris-2599934

Alternatively...

Select the parent object, then Create > New Group... from the menu. Now, if you make the group invisible, everything in the group - the parent and all its children - become invisible too. You can, of course, group multiple items together in this way - they don't have to be one parent with child items.

[Added: Just noticed that cwichura already suggested this!]