Backing that call for Box Select!
And also what Tungee said re the Delete etc being inconsistent in the Outliner.
And love Eugenio’s idea of columns and being able to group objects by certain properties is cool.
Oh and Unparenting, of course, would be ace (my impulse would be to drag it up to the Scene node to unparent)
One more thing I would LOVE to see in the Outliner is ‘master’ Restrict Selection/Visibility/Render buttons: i.e. one at the top of each column that toggles all the ones beneath on and off. And a shortcut for these master buttons as well as the existing ‘S’ toggle/on option.
(As regards Restrict Selection, I’m surprised Blender doesn’t have a shortcut for Unlock All when you’re in the 3D viewport, actually! Or am I missing something?)
Hello everyone! Just wanted to let you know that I’ve updated my drag and drop work so that it is now possible to clear parents in the outliner. Video is at the top of the thread.
That is awesome SCUEY!
Oh, and hey, i’ve been advised to copy and paste one of my main issues with the Outliner in to this thread by Zeffii, so here it is. I hope someone can act on it…
I use [Numpad .] a lot to centre selected objects or bones in the 3D View. I also often want to use it in the outliner to quickly reveal whereabouts any selected bone is in the armature hierarchy. But using [numpad .] in the outliner does not cause the armature to automatically expand and reveal the individual bone i have selected, as I would expect. It just highlights the armature root itself, which is unhelpful to say the least.
(I have since noticed this applies to any hierarchy and is not specific to bones)
And the separate issue, which is specific to bones (and is just aesthetics) is that once I have manually expanded the hierarchy and scrolled around to find my bone, it is still very hard to identify as the selected one (ie, the highlighting is unclear).
Fiddling about with the outliner colours has not helped here so maybe someone else can :0)
The second thing I could put up with reluctantly if the first thing weren’t such an issue.
Surely if I select a bone in the 3D view, then press the ‘center selected’ shortcut over the Outliner, it makes sense that i want the outliner to reveal that individual bone or component of the hierarchy, not just point me to the root of it.
I hope that explains my issues :0)
hope this gets into trunk, and begins a steady progression towards an outliner that is robust enough to serve the purpose that similar panels do in other 3D apps. !! great work!!!
This is looking great! But I sincerely hope that someone addresses the lack of multi-select next. Not being able to shift and ctl select (like in an explorer or finder window) makes the outliner nearly useless with large scenes. And not only that, but once you have your selection, it would be great to apply hide/show, select/no select and render toggles to the whole selection at once. This, combined with drag and drop would make the outliner useful.
Not being able to shift and ctl select…
Whilst I agree that SHIFT selection would be nice, perhaps adopting the multiple selection method used in the filer window, or even a box selection mode, would be more consistent with the rest of Blender?
Also, ‘left clicking’ in the outliner already acts like CTRL clicking.
…but once you have your selection, it would be great to apply hide/show, select/no select and render toggles to the whole selection at once.
This can already be accomplished via the ‘right click’ menu.
@fahr: Thanks! But maybe I don’t understand what you mean about multiselect. You can already Shift + left-click several times to extend your selection to multiple objects - have been able to for a long time. Is this what you mean? Now, yes I believe CTRL does not work and of course you can’t use the arrow keys, but anyway…
Also, with regard to selection, I do have a border-select tool (box-select) implemented now as of about a week ago. I just hadn’t posted anything about it yet. I did this because, yes, it is a feature which fits in VERY nicely with drag and drop parenting and parent clearing. Really allows you to get things done quickly.
I think a border-select tool is pretty self explanatory… so no video, unless there is interest in seeing one.
Thanks to everyone for the nice feedback and encouragement!
Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but right clicking “toggle visibility” only works on one object at a time, not all of the selected objects at once.
Yes, you can shift select objects, but only one object at a time. If you have 30 objects in a scene and want to select 24 of them, you need to move and click 24 times to select them all. What would be great is to be able to select the first object, then shift-select the last one, which would select everything in between, like a standard file browser window.
Box select looks like it would do that job too, and still be consistent with blender’s standards, so that could be a good solution as well.
Once you’ve box selected a group of objects, you can still shift select to toggle an individual selection, right? Can your box selection implementation act as a deselect if you middle mouse drag?
Sorry for the slight off-topic, but I read somewhere that if you have a parent selected in the outliner, you can make it select all of it’s children as well. Is that possible, I can’t find such a feature anywhere.
This is all good and useful stuff! Gee! I’m looking forward my next 3D period! So many things come in in such few time… i’ll have to check through all the features again, when i’ll get to work on a scenario! Much will depend on the ease of gathering effects… Tremendous job, you make here! Thanks!
Hi all, I was just checking in to see if there was any chance of Scuey’s outliner work showing up in trunk anytime soon. It could be SOOOO helpful. Is there anything I (or we) can do to help get it prioritized? Perhaps e-mailing Ton and letting him know this patch is here and we want it (Ton maintains Outliner, right?).
