WISH - Isolate Selected Objects in

[MattG]

I have had this come up semi-often over the years and always have had little workarounds for it, but I guess I really should have requested this be an option.

 

What I am wanting is a toggle button in the view menu bar that will allow for only seeing selected items.  

 

My specific example at the moment is working in the entertainment industry I am working on a lighting system.  The system has a number of classes and layers already build.  I have a couple of curves that are in tricky places to click and I want to adjust the position of some fixtures in there.  I am finding I am selecting non-relevant objects.  I am hoping there would be a way I can just select the 10-15 items, click a toggle button, and have only those selected items visible.  This is somewhat similar to the clip cube, but in this example, I don't want to try to spend time isolating in on the specific area I am working in I want to focus only on the items I select.

 

I cannot group as items are on different layers and I would lose that, but basically, I want the view like that in the edit mode of a group.

 

Screenshot of current situation attached.

 

Thanks,

Matt

[markdd]

Are you familiar with the Custom Visibility tool? Menu>Tools>Custom Visibility

 

You can create a script that will hide everything apart from the selected objects and also show them again. From there you could turn the script into a menu command which in turn you could assign to your right-click contextual menu.

 

Edited February 23, 2019 by markdd

[grant_PD]

Mark, your solution raises another feature I wish VW had.  There are many tools in the VW toolset, and if you do not have them in your workspace, you could be laboring unnecessarily.  Without having to go to the workspace editor, I wish there was a way to open a list of ALL tools and commands and browse them (complete with descriptions about their functionality) and then execute them from there.  Similar to C4D's "commander" function.

[Art V]

This is similar to the isolate command in DWG cad software and can be quite useful to get rid of clutter while working on selected objects. It would probably be more convenient to have it in a right mouse button click pop-up menu as well.

 

Maybe Vectorworks should take a look at the quad cursor in Bricscad and implement something similar. For those not familiar with that, it is a pop-up window that automatically comes up when hovering over an object (selected or not) showing the most common operations for such an object so that you are just one or two clicks away from the commands/operations. It even "learns" which command/operation you usually do so after  a few times it will show that one first and then the other options. It can improve efficiency quite a bit when implemented/used properly, especially if you can customize it with commands/operations you use very often to be shown every time.

[michaelk]

Hi Matt

 

These scripts do exactly what you asked for.  I'm told that there used to be menu commands to hide selected, hide unselected, and show all.  Like way back.

 

Those commands are long gone, but the script commands are still there and still work.

 

 

Show and Hide.vwx

[JMR]

This is probably an unnecessary advice, but here goes anyway in case someone overlooked it: The class options can be set to show only the current class in the OIP. This way most of the clutter goes away, if a situation is such that the to-be-edited items are in one class.

 

I had no idea of that custom visibility tool, have to take a look.