hide faces/polygons

achillesian

Did a search on this, didn't find any thread titles related to it, so i thought I'd ask.

Is there a way to hide faces in Maya besides the isolate selected feature (which also hides everything else including my reference plane [and i don't want to have to un-reference the plane, select and re-reference the plane every time i hide something])

Furthermore is there a way in max to easily do this as well? I have both and still seem to favor maya simply because of the movement controls, shelf and ease to move vertices.

If this isnt a standard feature and has to be done with a script i'm going to be very mad, most things i found when i googled this were from 2003-06 and featured scripts for maya.

Thanks.

achillesian

bizzump? Is this just a really dumb question?

pior

Yup in Max it's simply the hide/unhide buttons in the edit poly modifier panel. They are not in the quad menus by default but you can easily put them up there too (they are different from the regular hide/unhide)

If needed I can go into more details

Don't know about Maya, I never managed to make it behave that way properly.

Frump

If what you want is its own object you can use layers or ctrl+h. If it's just faces you want to hide, you will have to split them into their own object to hide or put in a layer. You could assign a transparent shader to faces if you wanted or use the x-ray mode. Other than that I don't know if a way exists. I've never really felt like I needed it.

bugo

right, I've never really felt like i needed it too. Is there a specific reason you want that? And yes, isolate selected faces works exactly as you expect, just select the faces u want and isolate it, so you hide anything else.

kodde

Why not select what you want to keep viewing and then go isolate selected? There's no problem in selecting faces and a totally different object in object mode (say your reference plane), and then go isolate selected. Works just fine. Other similar features could be using layers or the hide as people already mentioned.

arshlevon

rise from the grave!!! had a co worker ask this same question the other day, i couldn't find him anything so i wrote a simple little mel script that does it. it toggles, so first time you run this it will hide selected, the next time it will unhide everything. few issues is that it also hides any additional geometry in the seen, so if you have a sphere and cube in a scene, select a few polys on the sphere and hide them, it will also hide the cube, but not any unselected faces on the sphere, its just the nature of the isolate selected command. also kinda whacks out if you have reflection turned on..

//////////////////////////////////////////////////
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
//hide selected
string $currentPanel = `getPanel -withFocus`;
string $panelType = `getPanel -to $currentPanel`;
int $hide_selected ;

if($hide_selected == 1)
{
InvertSelection;
enableIsolateSelect $currentPanel true;
$hide_selected = 0;
select -cl;
}
else
{
enableIsolateSelect $currentPanel false;
$hide_selected = 1;
}
/////////////////////////////////////////////

malcolm

For people that prefer the reverse, you could add to your script to invert the selection first so it would hide show unselected. I prefer show selected though.

arshlevon

yeah, actually, it is doing that right now.

scannerD

Is there also a similar script for isolate selection?

firestarter

Thanks arshlevon, works well. It auto-hides joints, as an aside.

CyberGolem

Cool script Arshlevon, but I'm getting strange behavior from the other objects in my scene. Even by selecting objects in in the outliner I can't get these objects to (re)show once they disappear.