Forum: Bryce


Subject: Selecting multiple mesh objects??? Help!!

EricofSD opened this issue on Jun 11, 2002 ยท 7 posts


EricofSD posted Tue, 11 June 2002 at 7:17 PM

Ok, I'm stumped. Brought in a house that I made in a cad program and it has several hundred mesh objects. (not unlike bringing in a complex poser model). I want to select the walls, all the walls, that are labeled "wall-1...wall-2" and on and on. So the two ways I know are to visually click and hold the shift key and keep clicking (and unclicking when Bryce decides that the ground plane or a light object out of view should be selected for some strange buggy reason). The other way is to go to the down arrow and open the mesh list and select there. Problem... Mesh selection list closes each time I select one which means I need 30 or so trips back there to get them all. This sux. Any way to keep that list open so I can just go down the line and check the ones I want? This isn't a label problem, I know what labels I want, just don't want to have to get them one at a time. Thanks.


Aldaron posted Tue, 11 June 2002 at 7:26 PM

No way I know of to keep the list open, I know it's a big pain to say the least. Shift-click will select everything under the cursor (or unselect it if it was already selected). A better way would be to ctrl-click which will bring up a menu of objects that were under the cursor. Just shift-click each object you wish to select. Those are the only ways I know of.


EricofSD posted Tue, 11 June 2002 at 9:16 PM

Ok, I thought so. Both ways suck with large models. Corel can put this on my wishlist for a patch. Making the list stay open shouldn't be a big problem for the programmers.


Phantast posted Wed, 12 June 2002 at 5:25 AM

I quite agree. However, there is another way round this, which is to merge all the walls into a single mesh (outside of Bryce), and then you can select them all in one go, assuming you are happy to have them all the same material and don't want to move them in relation to one another within Bryce. This is what I do. Usually a complex object boils down to about ten different materials, so 100 meshes can be reduced to ten, and everything becomes far more managable.


dan whiteside posted Wed, 12 June 2002 at 12:18 PM

I too agree, selecting a whole bunch of objects is a real pain! What I do is the first time I import a large multi-part object is to create Color familes for each major group. It's a pain the first time but after that you can select by color. I often use the Invert Selction item in the Select Options pop-up. A lot of times it's easier to select what you don't want and then invert it. Also if you select several objects and then Solo them, all the pop-ups will only show what's currently soloed. HTH - Dan


EricofSD posted Wed, 12 June 2002 at 8:16 PM

Phantast, great idea and I agree that there are far fewer textures than are meshes. Unfortunately, I'm using Imsi's Floor Plan 6 for the buildings and I don't see how to select 'groups'. I suppose I could take the house apart and save in groups and reassemble in Bryce, but that takes just as long. I'll look into grouping a bit more. (Got turbocad designer 7 with the floor plan program at computer city for $39 so I couldn't pass it up). Maybe Imsi can solve this. Dan, that works too, but again, its a lot of selecting. Once I get the model parsed out the way I want it, it saves that way for future use, but first time through is tedious.


Phantast posted Thu, 13 June 2002 at 4:51 AM

Eric, it all depends on whether the meshes have texture names or not. If you have meshes wall1, wall2 ... wall356 in name, but they all have the texture name "wall", then you can run the obj file through the program Grouper (you have got that, right?). Grouper will create another obj file in which all meshes that have the same texture name are combined. It saves SO much time with exactly this problem. Then import into Bryce, and lo and behold, you have exactly the right number of meshes.