I have been working on a design for a shed/barn rebuild and have grouped similar objects, e.g. existing stone walls in one group, new timber frame, roof sheets, guttering, etc. in other separate groups. I find this a useful way to show/hide these features.
I thought I had lost a couple of grouped objects, so copied them from an older saved version, only later to find they had returned. But now I have ‘lost’ some groups and can’t find a way to retrieve them.
I have tried opening groups to see if I had hidden them within a group - is this possible, or does ‘unhide all’ not care whether objects are within groups?
I have checked that the objects are not in hidden layers.
Unhide cares about grouping.
To see your hidden groups go to View/Hidden geometry, then navigate to your groups and unhide them.
If you remember which groups contained the hidden groups navigate to/into them and then use Edit/Unhide/All.
As Box pointed out, the Outliner can be a huge help in finding hidden groups. One thing to consider is that Erase and Hide are next to each other in the Context menu. If you right click to get to Hide, you might inadvertently click on Erase. The apparent affect on the model is the same but obviously if you click on Erase, the group will be gone. If you catch it soon enough you can Undo back to where you erased it. You could lose a lot of work that way and if you save the file and come back to it the next day, you would have to recreate the group or, if you’re lucky, retrieve it from an older saved version of the file.
On the other hand, if you make a component instead of a group, you might erase the component from the model space but it will still be in the In Model Components library until you purge the unused components from it. This means if you discover the next day you mistakenly erased instead of hid the component, you can get it back via the Components browser potentially saving you hours of rework.
