Hi there! Really glad I found this forum / site, lots of great stuff here!

I've been playing around with Bryce for a few days now, and have one thing that is driving me absolutely nuts. When my scene gets somewhat complex, the process of selecting an object to work upon is just painful.

For example, I'll have dozens of things piled on top of each other, and want to select a cube. Even using CRTL-click, I'll get a list of Cube 1, Cube 2, Cube 3, ... Cube 47. Am I expected to go through and enter a meaningful name for every one of these? (I doubt it!)

I have discovered the trick of assigning objects to different color-coded groups, but that only helps a little. I think what I want is a way to say "Right now, I want groups A and B to be visible, and all of the other groups to disappear until I'm ready to mess with them again."

What's the RIGHT way to deal with this problem?

Thanks very much for any suggestions!!!

Assign your objects to families early, when you create or import the object. Then, when you want to work with just one family or group, go select that. There is a tiny icon at the bottom right that enters what is called "solo mode". When you press that with your group selected, only those objects will be visible. Of course, you can enter solo mode having selected anything before, not just families or groups. I hope this helps, and sorry for my English.

Or you can just lock the stuff you're not using at the time, so clicking normally will have no effect.

yes locking but you should get into the habbit of naming evry object

naming objects as you go is a must when building a complex model or scene. Because if you need to dupliucate a group that you made back at the beginning it will be very impossible to find it again. You don't need to name every object, just the major groups. Families are for the objects themselves.

That all really helps--thanks very much!

Remember ..Groups and families are independent of eachother. Many times I'll use families for texturing perposes, but they can span across multple groups..lets say for exapmple you have a few poser figures in your image. each figure is it's own group. ctrl click the shirts on each figure to make just the shirts active. assign those shirts to a particular family so you can later select all the shirts out in one fell swoop,even though they are each in different groups. Naming,grouping and families are essential to a busy Bryce image. Tom

Also, in a complex scene this is bound to be some sort of problem. Bryce handles it better than any other program I've used. Try it in Poser - yechh!

Making objects invisible is not possible in bryce. But you can merge scenefiles wich can be used to make codination in your scene easier. Here's what I advise: When you are using complex scenes you can make a base-file with the most important objects so you can codinate your scene. Give these important objects (wich are usually terrains, ground plane, water plane and maybe some other objects) one specific family so you can select them easily.(I just call this family the base-family) Save the base-file with a logical name. Now you can add all kinds of stuff you want in your scene to this base-file. When you want to save you delete the base-family so you have only the objects you added to the base-file left in your scene. Now save this as a 2nd file with a logical name. You can make as many files as you want so if you think your second scene-file is getting to complex you just start a third one by opening the base-scene and adding the new objects. If you want to render the whole project you open the base-file and then merge it with the other files. Make sure that you have one base-file with all the base objects and that the base objects are deleted from all the other scenes before you merge the whole project. When you've merged all the files you can render the whole project.

wow, that's kinda how I do it, although, mine has a LOT less complexity, so it typically isn't a big deal. once I start creating my own buildings and such, then I will start to worry about families(more than I do, anyway)

I press the control and shift keys at the same time this way you can choose only the object that you want and make a group at the same time! Even and object within another groupcan be selected solo Roch222

LOL! What?!? Objects cannot be made invisible?!? No one told me that! :) I have actually lost objects - lots of them - in a complex scene. I absolutely have to use all of the above techniques in scenes. I recently modeled a complex fence that looks like a rainbow and have more families and groups than the local YMCA! And...it's coming soon to a maketplace near you...

Tuttle: I used to create scenes like your's. I've learned to bring at least some order to my scenes when I began to merge 2 projects into one. I just couldn't figure out what object was what part of wich model anymore. You should make it an automated process to color-code and/or name your objects. Finding it out the hard way is much less fun.