Proposal to Separate Object Contents from Scene Hierarchy
I am switching from Cinema 4D where I work with some large engineering models containing 1000s of components. These engineering models generally have assemblies split into their own hierarchy in the outliner and it is very useful to see where the parent assembly objects are, indicated by a '>'
However one thing that is making the switch to Blender more difficult for me, is the way every object in the outliner is automatically a parent showing a '>', as it also combines object content as part of its hierarchy (object data, Materials, Modifiers, and list of modifiers etc...).
The result; is an unwieldy mix of model assemblies and object contents with no clear way of identifying which are which.
You can, of course, switch off object contents. However that results in no information about each object at all, which isn't ideal.
My suggestion would be Blender's object content hierarchy is separated from the scene's hierarchy in a second column. So you can drill down into the workings of each object if you need to, without the information making the scene model's hierarchy more complicated and larger than it needs to be.
You also wouldn't need a '>' arrows next to each object as only the ones that have object children would need a '>', making the model / scene's hierarchy a lot clearer. You also wouldn't need to indicate the child object, as an orange triangle in the object contents.
Does that make sense :-).
I've attached an image as an example showing the object contents of a Cube, before and after it has been revealed. It could perhaps be a different colour or perhaps done in a different way.
Before (showing just 3 parent objects and 1 child object)
After
6 Comments
Did you know you can have more than one of everything and configure each one differently?
But You cannot have both clearly visible hierarchy and objects contents enabled.
Thanks, that’s one way of separating the object’s information from the scene’s hierarchy, I didn’t think of creating multiple outliners as a work around. Although it does take up a lot of screen space having two outliners. Perhaps a good option for multiple monitors. I’d probably be ok if the ‘>’ was a solid triangle for scene structure and perhaps a slightly greyed out ‘>’ for object information. Then both could be combined in the same outliner.
In the larger left outliner, if it were possible to have special search terms like ":selected:" to filter out all but the 1 selected object, it would facilitate seeing just the heirarchy in the upper right outliner and all object contents of only the selected object in the left outliner.
I agree, mixing internal hierarchy with object level parenting is confusing now.
Something like this sounds nice. I think Blender's outliner is way too cluttered, it shows collections, objects, hierarchies AND object properties...