This frustrated me as well. I use Shift-H as a shortcut for Hide Rest of Model, which is usually very convenient (even in the midst of drawing geometry). But sometimes there is just too much other junk in the way in the complete model. I would often rely on x-ray vision to “peer through” the unrelated junk to find reference geometry, but that can be challenging. I don’t really think about layers for handling this, since I use them more to group conceptual entities independent of their nesting (e.g. “furniture”, “people”, “building”).
What I really wanted was similar to what you ask for: the ability to hide the rest of the model except everything up to the top level of this opened and active group or component. I.e. not just leaving parents visible, but grandparents and so on up to the root of the tree. E.g. in an outline of:
-
Component 1
- Group 1
- Group 2
- Component 3
- Group 3
- Component 3
- Group 4
- Group 5
- Group 6
- Group 7
If I was say actively editing Group 5, I could toggle Component 1, Group 6, and Group 7 to hidden, leaving Component 3 visible. And toggle them back again. So I wrote the attached plugin which does just this.
Just drop it in your Sketchup’s plugin folder. You’ll see a new menu item in Extensions. I personally assign it to Control-Shift-H. If you run it deep inside a hierarchy, it will hide every container at the top level that is not a direct ancestor of the current group or component. It leaves everything on hidden layers alone. If you back out to the top level without unhiding (by clicking, Esc key, etc.), it will unhide all top level containers for you. And if you directly open other nested geometry under another top-level ancestor while the option is active (e.g. from the outliner), it will reapply it. Probably easiest just to try it to get the gist.
I find it incredibly useful to toggle visibility of both rest-of-model and only-this-context-up-the-tree. Obviously, if you have all your entities in a single top level group or component, it won’t be useful. But then again that style of hierarchy isn’t so useful anyway.
Hope people enjoy!
hide_others_toplevel.rb (2.1 KB)