You know the little arrows in the Outliner that you click to toggle whether something is selectable in the viewport or not?
Well I used to know a key command for making all objects viewport selectable which was very useful when you have hundreds of objects and some are unselectable and parented away so they are hard to see in Outliner. I have forgotten this key command, and I cannot find it in hotkey lists like I used to. Has this key command been removed?
In the Outliner you can press v, s or r to toggle visibility, selectability or render visibility of the selected Outliner items that you can make selected clicking or shift clicking them in the area after the names, with b for border select or a to select all.
In addition to what MartinZ said, you can also left click and drag on the eye, arrow or camera icons to change the state of multiple objects with one gesture.
Also, if an object has children, you can change state of the object and all of it’s children by holding CTRL and clicking on one of those icons.
I tried them but neither of them quite do what I want.
MartinZ, for your method to work, you have to go round expanding every parenting branching so all objects can be seen listed in the Outliner. If the Parenting trees are collapsed anywhere , those objects’ names hidden by the collapsing will not be effected by pressing S. Expanding all parenting trees can takes ages in a complex scene (unless there is a shortcut for that too?). Also, if you have a mix of selectable (white arrow icon) and unselectable (greyed arrow icon) in the list, the S key merely inverts them (makes what were selectabe now unselectable and what were unselectable now selectable). What I want is to make ALL selectable or ALL unselectable regardless of current selectability setting.
Sabba, I was aware you can drag across states in the Outliner, but no good with very long lists with things hidden in parenting trees. For your second point, changing state based on parenting would take too long as there are so many parent trees.
you know how with your mouse cursor over viewport, if you press Alt H, EVERYTHING will become unhidden regardless of whether it was already unhidden or not? ALL becomes shown? Well there used to be a key command like that but for viewport selectability. It used to be written on hotkey lists but I can’t find it now. That is what I want, but i fear it may have been removed! Thanks!
While working I just noticed that s key toggles hide_select for objects so if one wanted to just make all objects in the scene selectable as I just happened to need to do myself just a few moment ago the shortcut is not that useful. If one wanted to quickly make all objects in the scene selectable python console can be used to set the hide_select property of all objects to False. This is easier than one might think, you just need to open Python panel and type: