[Bf-funboard] Groups display behaviour

Matt Ebb matt at mke3.net
Mon Mar 26 08:39:06 CEST 2007


On 3/23/07, Alexander Ewering <blender at instinctive.de> wrote:
>
> Intensely working with groups, I now had a group which had objects which
> where almost entirely transparent, so I set their drawtype to "Bounds" (or
> "Wire", for that matter).
>
> However, after instancing the group, I found that ALL objects that get
> instantiated use the drawtype from the GROUP DUPLICATOR, and the drawtypes
> of the original objects are discarded.
>
> This is of course a bit useless.


I agree, and it's also quite frustrating when using other duplication types,
especially duplifaces. I've just spent a quite frustrating couple of hours
working with these, fighting a very cluttered view. I want to be able to
turn the duplicating object to wireframe, and leave the duplicated objects
as they are so I can see them. Of course this isn't possible so if I want to
see it in solid or shaded view, my duplicated child objects are sliced in
two by the duplicator mesh faces!

To make matters worse, I can't even move the duplicating object to another
layer or make it invisible in the view, because then the child objects
disappear too.

The way you change the way the shape of a duplicated object looks is to edit
the original data. It seems pretty logical to me that you would change the
way it's displayed in a similar way, too. The duplicating objects are really
just helpers, to help position the other objects. It doesn't make sense for
them to be overriding other unrelated things as well.


> I suggested to Ton to make group duplicators use the *maximum combined
> drawtype* of both the original object and the duplicator (just like the 3D
> view works). However, he dismissed that as "Orange did it like this, and
> it
> proved to be useful".


I don't think it should be using a combined value, but that it should just
replicate the original data and settings. There's so much to keep track of
trying to figure out what to enable or disable on what different objects
already, let alone having the two values interacting with each other. It
would be so much simpler and less troublesome if there was just one
consistent place to go to.

I personally can't remember any specific examples of where it was useful to
override duplicated display settings in Orange. The only thing I can think
of is that it may somehow be useful when you're using linked groups and
don't have easy access to the original objects.

cheers

Matt
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