[3ds Max] Question about working with grouped objects

Nightingale

I have made several groups which consist of an object and all of its LODs all in the same location, like this:

What I would like to be able to do is display only the base LOD while I work on moving and rotating these groups around. Is there a way in 3ds Max to "hide" only certain members of a grouped object while being able to move them around, rotating, and scale them all at once?

Neox

i don't have max here, but wouldn't parenting do just that?

Redsett

Haven't used 3ds Max in a long time but you should be able to open the group, select the objects you want to hide, right click, hide selected.

Neox

yeah jus tested it, either parent your objects that will be hidden, or group all objects, open the group, hide the lowpolies, close your group again and then scale the group.

Nightingale

Oops, never noticed that "Open" button in the menu. I feel dumb now. Thanks guys!

Mark Dygert

You could also set the high poly objects to display as bounding box (right click, object properties) so you can still interact with them and move them around but they aren't slowing your scene down.

Scripting the bounding box toggle would be pretty easy too.

EDIT: Yep, crazy simple:

(
	Cursel = selection as array
 
	for i=1 to cursel.count do (
		ClearSelection()
		Select Cursel[i]
		if $.boxmode == true then (
			$.boxmode = off
		)
		else (
			$.boxmode = on
		)
	)
	Select Cursel
)

Drag the code from here, into the max toolbar to create a button that toggles the bounding box for whatever is selected.

You could also parent the hidden objects like Neox pointed out, then put them on their own layer and use it to toggle on/off their visibility. If you have a lot of objects I would suggest using Outliner so you can nest the layers in one main hidden layer and control their visibility globally for all the layers or individually for each layer. 3dsmax2015 which ships in a few days, will also have nested folders, but probably wait for SP1, the RC for max is normally pretty buggy at first.