Some time ago, I came across an extension that lets you create multiple versions of things, and save them as options that can be quickly switched between (to show a client “Version A”, “Version B”, “Version C” of a solution). For the life of me, I can’t remember what it’s called. Anyone know of such an extension?
Like FredoTools Ghost or GhostComp, but not swapping between a “real” and “ghost” version, rather swapping between “A”, “B”, and “C” versions.
If there’s a way to do this & have some sort of on-screen control (like a flip or slider switch, or checkboxes), that would be amazing. Any Ruby programmers in the audience? I’ll even pay for such a feature.
That’s an option, but I wanted something more “visual”, so when I’m showing a customer design options, I could switch between multiple “stored” items, without having to scroll up and down through the tag list, or force a view change to another angle, which is what will happen with a scene change.
You know you can just create scenes with the same camera angle and toggle tags on and off. I do this often for variants of timber frame structure - I’ll setup an interior view and toggle 1-2 options and save as scenes.
There is a simple trick for using scenes to manage this, as @DaveR and @bmike are showing and describing.
Create a scene for each version of your design as you normally would (by toggling the visibility of objects in the outliner and/or tags in the tags panel) and creating a scene.
The trick to match the camera view involves the scene update settings in the scenes panel. Enable the scene that has the camera you want, and then right-click on the scene you want the camera position copied to. Note, this does not appear to work using scene tabs: you must use the scenes pallet.
Choose “Update Scene” from the context menu. A new dialogue should show up with settings for what items you want to update in the scene. Unselect everything but the settings you want to copy/transfer. Click “update” and you are done.
When meeting with the client, all you need to do is double click to enable the scenes and nothing else. To simplify it more, you can expand the scenes panel (“show details”) and deselect “include in animation” from all the scenes that you don’t want to present to your client, and then when you enter presentation mode you will only see your saved A, B, C design analysis scenes.
If you want to keep the current view and not reset to a scene view you can use Trimble Connect. This is similar to what @rtches suggested but just using visibility toggling:
It’s even easier than that. Create as many scenes as you need, all with the same camera, style and tags.
Then without even using ‘update’ simply go to the scenes pallet - select the scene you want to change (no need to double click). Toggle the tag off and the new one on, then click and unclick the box next to Tags. Repeat as needed.
I do something similar to what you are describing when I first setup my scenes in a new file, but I’m not sure how you are saving the scene settings without clicking update (or add new)? Are you saying there is a there a box next to tags to save it to the scene in one click? Have I missed this all these years?
It took me a long time to realise this - but for situations like this it can be really good to simply have the camera option unchecked in the Scene’s attributes.
In other words, scenes don’t have to store the camera position - they can just save what attributes you want to save such as visibility.
I use this all the time to save scenes which offer different visibitlies of objects. This way I can just orbit to any angle and use the scenes to show the different set ups without the camera jumping around.
