[sidenimjay]

first off , i am a houdini artist not a maya guru . . .


with that said, i am trying to use object visibility and have found some oddities . . .


in the attribute editor, i notice there are 2 places to change the visibility status of an object
one is on the Object tab, the other is on the ObjectShape tab.

i currently turn both off to hide an object from M~R. it seems to me that only the visibility on the ObjectShape tab is the one that matters to M~R, as a ctrl+h doesnt hide the geometry from the render. and to ensure that an object is not rendered, its best to just delete it from the file . would seem better/more intuitive to connect the ctrl-h to the visibility in M~R . . .

further does the visibility of the Group affect the objects inside? if not it should, so one doesnt have to hand hide a hundred different objects . . .

last thing, it seems that no visibility options work for turning off a light. i am always having to delete a light, or set to 0 inensity to turn off the light . . . would be nice if hiding the visibility of a light removed it from computations.

anyone else experiencing oddities this way, or is it just that i am a novice maya user ?

[jep]

sid - great suggestion!
This is a major workflow/ease of use issue. I thought visibility didn't work at all. Great recomendation... yes please, can we have Maxwell obey the Object Tab attribute instead? - that is the one that shows up in the channel box and the same one that ctrl+h/shift+h are bound to.
I'm sure all Maya users will agree - It's so much easier to hide an object by goup with the keyboard shortcut and have Maxwell obey that rather than go in and hide things piece by piece by piece.... Hopefully it's as easy is changing the attribute the MEL code is looking for!

I like your idea about hiding emitters as well!
~j

[sidenimjay]

Kris thanks for the layer info,

is that different than selecting your objects and ctrl-g grouping?






(i knew there was i reason i preferred houdini, almost ready to write an .ma translator lol)

[Brett Morgan]

yep adding objects to a layer is totally different, great way to organise things, the outliner can get messy, well for me since I cant even clean my room

Just create a new layer in the layer editor and select your objects, right click and add selected, you can hide or template them too with the checkbox.and when your done just delete the layer and the ubjects will be removed from any layers, my god its 5:30am, hope I just made sense, see how you go

Cheers

Brett

[jep]

geat ideas guys - thanks for sharing. I think I'd still like Maxwell to obey the ctrl+h though. But I like the idea of layers.

Jep

[br1]

Mmmm, I tried that layer thingy and it works great for preview renders. However I'm trying to render an animation. So I setup things and throw a batch render. In my animation the hidden layers appear...

Is there any workaround to that ?