I open some of my old Blender 2,5 scenes and get some objects having gray eye whatever I click. Is there a ultimate “show all” button ?
Toggle monitor icon, unintuitively this is the new eye icon
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Thanks a lot [Hadriscus] . It does help. I almost gave up trying to figure out this old files puzzle
Wait, what???
You can go to outliner filtering options and choose to show the monitor icon. It is the equivalent of the eye icon in pre-2.8x
Okay, but how does it differ from the eyeball icon that is there? TBH, I was always a bit fuzzy on the difference between the eyeball and the monitor, since they seemed to do much the same thing.
(I see you’ve already addressed this: that functionality seems quite redundant, and not worth the screen space.)
(New icons for Blender 2.8 - #2544 by Mr_Flamey)
Having just messed with them: there’s a hella long delay for a particular mesh (with 1 modifier) when you turn the monitor icon back on in my simple scene. Zero delay with eyeball. It’s like a 2.5 second delay before the element returns to the display, long enough to make you think something went wrong and click it a bunch more times. Other meshes in the scene don’t suffer this effect though.
EDIT: what I’d really like is a toggle to conceal the UI representation of, especially, the Lights, without removing their effect. TMK all the light toggling switches remove the effect of the light, not just their 3dview icons.
Thanks for linking to this thread… I had the two reversed. I guess it was still rather new when I wrote this. So, the monitor is the actual visibility, regardless of viewlayer. When you link in an object from another file, this is what determines its visibility. The eye on the other hand, is a per-viewlayer override.
The problem is it’s really not obvious, just looking at the icon, what either of these do -and the tooltips are absolutely not helpful. Investigation was required to find out their function and that’s really not great. Also why isn’t there another render icon analogous to the eye icon, as well ? one that would act on a per-viewlayer basis ? there is no way to toggle object or collection rendering on or off in a specific collection right now which seems quite a big limitation.
In short, this collection system has not been thought-through and it seems like nobody cares. 
I can only guess the monitor toggling rebuilds dependency graph relations, which is why it’s slower.
This particular object isn’t linked in from somewhere else, the entire file is very simple, and the only even semi-elaborate option is a Bevel modifier. 
One can turn off the UI representation of the Lights using the EXTRAS checkbox in the Overlay dropdown – this also conceals the camera. IMO this qualifies as “buried”, given all the other visibility toggles available on the surface of the UI. As an ex-RW shooter, I got to say that it grates on me that lights and cameras are considered “Extras” in the Blender world – wtf? Also, to lump them together seems lazy.
The whole approach to Blender UI seems very CAD-ish to me: camera movement & navigation seems an afterthought. This is ok running a CNC machine, not so much in a animation package. It may have been decades ago, but the foundation shows thru.
I don’t think this has any sort of influence over the time taken to rebuild depsgraph
Personally I have a very good experience with navigation in general with Blender. I am coming from Maya, which has more or less the same tools but are not as readily accessible. For instance there is no way to roll the view (tilt it to the side), and you have to activate a specific tool (found in a dropdown) to make a 2D zoom from within your camera view.
We’re straying from the original post, though, maybe it’s time to go ranting in of those thousand-page-long threads.
The eye hides or shows the object in the viewport. It’s what is toggled off by pressing H. The monitor disables or enables the object in viewport. Objects disabled in the viewport by using the monitor icon don’t get revealed when using Alt+H. Then there’s the camera icon. Enables or disables the objects in renders. This all seems like a perfectly good arrangement to me.
Cameras and lights (and things like empties and the like) are lumped under Extras in the Viewport Overlays panel because they are non-renderable objects.
Force fields and armatures are apparently not considered “extras” even though they’re utilities and aren’t renderable either…
Dammit, I am transforming into another @Jeric_Synergy ! what have you done to me ?
I miss the simplicity and look of 2,5 interface . Have been best UI ever . So intuitive and instantly understandable.
Wasted hours for new outliner puzzles and while I’ve got accustomed to a new one I still think it 's a perfect example of “better is an enemy of good”
But that’s not ALL it does: it removes the effect of the Light (and the Camera-- I think you can’t render if it’s off).
IMO, “Hiding” is not equivalent to “turn off all effect”, which is what the eyeball does do, not JUST Hide. A simple checkbox would more accurately convey what the switch does: it disables the Light.
“Extras” is too broad a category: Lights and Camera should be broken out separately, even if grouped under “Extras”. And more than likely I’ve already made these proposals over at RCS.
Come to the dark side… that realizes the UI is a human construct, not a heaven-sent sacred text for fanbois to worship and defend to the death.
You can disable every object type independently in its own dropdown, so there’s that. I agree that hiding the lamp overlay shouldn’t necessarily mean disabling the lights. If it’s really annoying you can set your lamp collection to unselectable, but they’re still going to be around for sure
@Jeric_Synergy I think you’re misinterpreting some of the response that you’re getting to your messages. Sure I guess some people can’t see flaws in things they like, but you also don’t make it easy to read you. Pretty much every remark you make, no matter how relevant, is worded in a harsh way, and not only is there no need for that, it’s most likely counter-productive. Your ideas may be pertinent but if they’re wrapped in something that most people would read as agression, it’s going to end up nowhere.
Mostly I’m not wanting to see them: selectablity is not so much the issue. With a lot of lights it can be quite busy visually.
It might be nice to have a UI opacity setting for Collection, or maybe “unselected Collections”. Then it would be automatic that the collection being worked on would be most visible. In this case, putting all the lights in their own Collection would make it easy to control their visibility. Collection-by-collection UI opacity might be slick, and if a user didn’t like it they could ignore the feature.
Yes, I believe Modo distinguishes between selected and unselected objects, so that what you’re working on is always more prominent. Such a system would be welcome (either dim the rest or show it as bounding boxes).
Yes, a setting that defines various display options for unselected items. Either opacity or ‘style’, or both.
I suggested collections because that seems to give the most bang for the buck. Programatically, nested collections could get ugly. Maybe limit it to top level Collections, ie ones with no ‘parents’.
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