[LesliePere]

Here's a little screenshot of my DBM (Database Manager) for reference.



It seems that the Volume View icon button at the bottom and the Volume View menu item in the popup menu is not in sync. Using the above image as a reference...

1. Click once on "Plastics". Now click the Volume View icon at the bottom. The DBM says "There is currently no Volume selected."
2. Now click the Materials icon at the bottom to go back to the catalog.
3. This time right click on "Plastics" and select "Volume View" from the popup menu. This time the DBM correctly displays the materials within Plastics.

I guess it depends what was the intent with this. To me, when I click once on "Plastics" it hilites. So obviously it IS selected, therefore I'm thinking it should display the contents of Plastics, when I click the Volume View icon at the bottom, as opposed to saying that no volume is selected.

Of course if I already selected the Plastics correctly, then I hilite (eg click once) "Colors" on the catalog view then press the Volume View icon at the bottom, the DBM will display the previously selected "Plastics", since the only way it will give me the correct volume view if I select the "Volume View" menu item from the popup menu.

I guess it's just a little confusing, because when I think of TreeView controls in general, once I click on the parent node, it is considered selected. But in this case it is not, until I confirm my selection from a popup menu.

[JDHill]

I completely understand what you're saying, but what you are seeing is the intended behavior - it requires an explicit choice from the context-menu. That may not make alot of sense when you have so few Materials in your database, but it does when you consider the database is designed to handle thousands, and that it may be configured such that those Materials aren't even located on the local machine. To show thumbnails, each Material must be loaded, and with 200x200 previews, you're talking about a good amount of memory for each one - if the Volume View showed everything just by clicking around the tree, it would mean loading/unloading potentially hundreds of MB of Materials on each mouse-click. Also, factor in that when the plugin's Auto-Select Materials option is enabled, selecting an object in the viewport will cause its' Material to be selected in the browsers, so you could have the Volume View swapping out collections of thumbnails all the time just based on selecting things in the viewport.

Of course, I'm open to any ideas for making it more intuitive, as long as they also take these factors into account.

[LesliePere]

Yeah, that makes sense now. Tx for the xplanation!

[JDHill]

The next update will show the selected Volume whenever the Volume View page is shown.