AFMG Network Forum

Lindsay Smith · Member

I have been making fairly complicated models and keeping track of where things are can become difficult. I have been playing with turning visibility off of some things in tables to simplify what I am looking at. Is there any way at all to filter or sort a table? I can export tables data, but I can't find out how to import any data. Because of the random order that faces, loudspeakers and vertexes end up in, it can be quite tedious and time consuming to select each entity by hand.

I mostly want to turn off the the floor or the roof so if I could filter by Z, I could turn off the visibility of the part I wasn't working on. Creating objects won't help, I'm still modifying the room and loudspeakers. It would take ten minutes to save me five minutes.

Lindsay Smith
Seattle

Jim Mobley · Member

Hi Lindsay

While the tables are not sortable, here are a couple of tricks that might be helpful.

1) Likely the floor or ceiling will all be the same material, you can use the Tools > Color and Material Coupled tool to make all faces of the same material the same color, making them easy to see. Then using shift-click or ctrl-click to select multiple items in the table, you can use the Tools > Set Value To menu item to change the visability of of the selected faces.

2) Have you discovered the Mouse menu selection tool? Mouse > Activate Items. This mouse mode allows you to draw a window which activates every item contained in or touched by the window outline. Once items are active, when you select Insert > Create Object, the first option is to add active items to the object. Click Yes, and you have an Object that can be saved and deleted from the project temporarily, then brought back in.

Couple of hints on this one; 1) be sure to hit the F8 key first to deactivate all items, just to be sure you don't get random loudspeakers or areas in the object; 2) It often helps to go to a straight X, Y or Z view before selecting; 3) if you can't make a perfect selection, remember F8 toggles selection on and off for a selected item.

Anonymous · Guest

Have you tried the suggestion made by Jim? If yes, how did it turn out?