I use groups and components a lot - I think that it’s the best way to work. However I do sometimes get a bit lost in what group the piece of geometry is in that I’m working on.
The “entity info” window is useful to tell me what component/group I’ve selected and how many more of them are in the model, but a bit more information with regard to what’s actually in the selection could be handy at times:
- An indication of if the selection is wholly within a parent group or component, (Perhaps the title could be italic?) and what the component actually is (Perhaps have a r-click menu on the bold selection title in that window:
- (title) {component name} : [nn] objects ( [nn] selected)
- Select all objects in component
- Exit component
- how many entities are in the selection (Again, drilling down for a further breakdown would be nice; perhaps expanding the text with a [+] button like an explorer window? Lists number of...
- components [+]
- groups [+]
- edges
- surfaces
... are in the selection, with a suffix of ([nn] hidden)
- how many textures are in the selection, Perhaps the "materials selection" drop-down could have a filtered group of "in selection" (like it has one for "in model")
- bounding box coordinates. If the selection was made into a group/component, then where the X,Y,Z of the origin would be and the width. height, depth. Perhaps a little wireframe box graphic that changed the hover text when over a node or line? (or click it for an info popup)
- if a selection is a component/group, then if it has been scaled (and in what direction) Perhaps arrows on the wireframe above could indicate a scaling? If the scaling on every item within the selection is identical, then the arrow for that direction would show it's self.
- If a selection has a dynamic component within it, have a button or other indicator that can be clicked on to activate the dynamic bit (even if the component is nested within other objects within the selection) Perhaps a drop-down that populated with a list of dynamic components; select one and it pops up the relevant dialogue.
- Have an option to hide everything *except* the current selection: a 'focused' view? an 'edit' view? Click on an icon within the entity info window or access through the edit menu. Indicate this mode with a grey border around the workspace that could be clicked on to restore things back to normal. If the selection contained only one group or component, then exiting it would restore.
- the entity info panel is titled "Component (5 in model)" - so it knows there are 4 others. It could be a nice tool to have an eyeball button to "move to next component"; it would position the camera to the next instance of this selection (using scene transition, relative camera position to the component's axis).
- If the component has a warehouse ID, then have a button to check for updates to the component and then to download and apply them (preview first in case the author has done something that would screw with how you used it)