Choose how hidden hidden geometry is in edit/sculpt mode.
in edit/sculpt mode you can hide parts of the mesh with h or shift h, and then uhnide with alt h.
to make it easy to align the unhidden geometry being edited to hidden parts of the same geometry, have a 'hidden geo opacity' slider in the edit mode overlay options. Zero is totally hidden, 1 is a slightly visible ghost.
To accompany that option there could be a snap to hidden option too, which would only work if hidden geo opacity set greater than 0.
7 Comments
Ideally hidden geometry would never be edited by any operator. What operations are you thinking about could be useful to operate on hidden geometry?
unhidden geometry would never be edited? Isn't that the only geometry you'd want to edit? Or did you mean hidden geometry would never be edited? If so, yes absolutely, the hidden parts of the mesh should never be editable even if it is slightly visible as suggested in this proposal. Keeping it slightly visible is just to make it easier to edit the unhidden parts of the mesh for alignment purposes.
Sorry yes that's what I meant. I edited the message.
This can turn in a bigger feature. I'm thinking object level opacity/visibility, animatable and renderable.
you can already do that with a mask modifier. This proposal is just to make editing geometry easier, to make sure you don't push unhidden parts of the mesh through hidden parts of the mesh, or for snapping to the hidden parts of the mesh.
mask mod has only boolean visibility, I am talking about progressive opacity, also independent of the shader. This works in other software as a mix factor of the object on the render buffer.
ah yes you're right. I incorrectly thought the mask mod's weight could be controlled by the vertex attribute value.
Personally though, I'd rather the slider only affect overlays. Keeps it simple, makes sure it only affect hidden parts of the geometry, and ensures it affects all objects.
I think for what you want a separate 'render opacity' slider per object in the object properties visibility section would be more apt, as that's where the render visibility controls live, and would enable you to only affect specific objects. Personally I'm happy with using shaders to achieve this, I don't seen any benefit to doing it outside of the shader.