If save a scene after hiding some nested components (on level 2), it works and saves it, but affects ALL scenes, making it useless. Is this a bug, or is there a work around?
No. It’s not a bug. You are changing the state of the nested component similarly to adding or deleting geometry. You should be using layers to control visibility of components instead of Hide.
I think it is a bit of an inconsistency with Sketchup scenes properties. How is it that it behave in a certain way with components on the root level of the outliner, but the same doesn’t apply when components are nested.
If the visibility of nested groups cannot be saved between scenes, then the use of outliner is greatly limited.
Layers is not always the answer to control the visibility of components. It is good to hide or show large groups of objects, but becomes very cumbersome when you need to show/hide only certain objects within a layer.
It would be very handy when working with imported .skp within a model, as the layers become shared and mixed.
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I’ve also found this feature extremely confusing and long thought it was a bug. If it was up to me I’d remove it because of the confusion it creates. Layers are the recommended way to control visibility anyway.
The reason a scene cannot unhide geometry inside a component is that action would edit the component definition. As a result, hiding geometry inside a component has to apply to all the instances of that component in your model. One potential work around is to use a flatter component hierarchy. Don’t use components just for model organizational purposes. However I realize that may not be ideal or work in every situation
I agree that hiding nested objects with scenes would be useful for presentation purposes but those visibility settings tend to be more instance based (one particular component instance) instead of definition based (affects every instance of a component). It would be better if we had a dedicated application for creating animations and presentations. That way we wouldn’t have to make choices between modeling workflows and presentation workflows.
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I would visibility of entities inside groups/componnets to be the same in all instances of the group/component. That is how components are supposed to work so I’m not sure what the problem is. If you’d want to affect just one instance you need to toggle the visibility state of the instance itself, not the nested entities. The same already applies to layers; to toggle the visibility of a specific instance you need to toggle the visibility of the layer applied to the instance, not the layer applied to the content.
[Insert thinking emoji heere] When I think of it I can understand that you don’t want to edit the component (give it a new GUID) since that has the side effect of SketchUp seeing it as a new unique component if copied into a model where it is already present or if’s placed again from 3d warehouse or a local file.
Anyhow I think this feature appears very bugged and still think SketchUp would be better off without it in its current state.
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Like this one? 
Entered by typing ":thinking:"
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Exactly that one! I missed the arrows in the bottom right corner of the emoji dialog so I couldn’t find it. 
That would be great. It would solve a lot of issues.
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The more I think of this the less sense it makes to me. Active section cuts are associated with scenes on a per Entities basis. Changing the active section by switching scene does not create a new GUID for the definition either. I really can’t see why the same functionality can’t be supported by Hidden Geometry.
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It never made sense to me either.
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PIDs and GUIDs did not exist back when scenes first launched. As a result, I can imagine it would have been pretty daunting to track an object if it moved around in the component hierarchy after it’s visibility was associated to a scene. I think we could better support hiding nested objects today. But I also still feel that the UX is always going to be less than what users really want for advanced presentation and animation features. A dedicated app would be better. Also note that locked components could get in the way of hiding and unhiding via scenes.
FWIW We still do have an open issue for this - SU-14690 which was created WAY back in march of 2005.
~B )
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I have always assumed GUIDs have existed ever since Components and Groups were implemented. When a component is added to a model, e.g. the file is dropped on it or it’s pasted from the clipboard, I think it’s the GUID that makes SketchUp know whether it should place a new instance of an existing definition or add a new definition to the model (with incremental number in the name if the name is already taken).
I think SU had entity ids originally but they were not persistent or guaranteed to be unique. GUIDs were added around SU 2014 when we launched the IFC support.
Oh, I meant definition GUIDs, not instance GUIDS.