Switching between sets of objects becomes easy
Customize controls to fit your demands
This blender addon expands on the idea of View Layers. It allows you to create controls like sliders, dropdowns, and checkboxes that you can hook up to objects or collections in your scene. Those objects are then set hidden or visible depending on the state of those controls. For example, you can create a checkbox that toggles all objects with the string Cube in their names.
- Download this repositories code as zip archive
- In Blender, navigate to
Edit > Preferences > Add-ons - Hit the Install button
- Select the downloaded file
- Enable the Addon in the list
After installation, you can find the plugin in the right-hand bar of the 3D view. It is divided into two panels: Use and Manage.
The Use panel shows all the controls you have set up. This is where you interact with them to actually manipulate objects and collections in your scene.
The Manage panel shows the settings of one specific control you wish to modify. To enter it, click on the three dots icon next to a control. It shows the following elements:
| Element | Function |
|---|---|
| Name | Set the name of your control |
| Type | Set whether the control is a checkbox, slider, or dropdown |
| Action | What should happen when a control state is changed? Should an object's visibility be toggled? Or a collection's? Or should objects be selected? |
| States | For each state of the control, set the objects or collections to manipulate. More below. |
Controls have a modifiable number of states. Sliders have one for each integer: if you add four states to a slider, you can change the slider between zero and three. For each state you add to a dropdown you gain a new entry in its list. Checkboxes can only handle two states: on and off. It toggles between the first two states you add to it, and ignores all others.
Each state has the following attributes:
Each state has a name, but only dropdowns are able to show it. It's the string shown in the corresponding entry in their list.
The match type of a state specifies how you like to provide the state with the targets (objects or collections) to manage. A match by reference lets you directly choose a target from a list; a match by name let's you specify a regular expression. By choosing the latter, the state is linked to each target with a name for which the expression matches.
Each state lets you specify an arbitrary number of patterns (regular expressions or references). If a state becomes active after making changes to its control in the Use panel, its associated targets are shown (or selected, depending on your control's action). Targets associated with other states of the control are hidden or deselected. Objects or collections not linked to any state of the control are ignored. Regardless of type, per control there is always only one active state.
Maybe you have noticed that Blender's interplay of object hierarchy and visibility is a bit different from other applications. When you hide an object, its children actually stay visible. You can hold Alt to hide them as well, but if you then turn a child back on, it shows up despite of its parent still being hidden. Many other applications make the parent override the state of its children. Regardless whether a child wants to be visible, if the parent is hidden, so are all of its children. If the parent is visible however, the children can decide for themselves.
To be useful Control Center actually relies on this behaviour, so it imitates it. An active state will not enable an associated object if one of its parents is hidden. But it will keep track of this child's status internally, so that when the parent does become visible, the child is activated as well. Other children still wanting to be hidden stay hidden.
Why is this behaviour so important? Let me give you an example. Imagine one checkbox toggles a parent object for all fences in the scene. Besides that, a dropdown lets you choose between a construction fence and a wire fence. The objects for those fence variants are children of the Fences object. If the checkbox is turned off, you don't want any of the fences to be visible, regardless of the type chosen by the dropdown. But if you turn the checkbox on, you don't want both fences to be visible, either. Only the chosen one. You can't easily replicate this interplay without the behaviour described above. That's why this plugin operates the way it does.