Hide and Seek   1.0 Help Doc

Bringing your objects to you!

Mobirise

Search Everything!

Every object and tag type and name is searchable with support for Xparticles, Vray, and Octane objects.

Isolate Your Selections

Solo your selection to create a more workable environment and hone in on the essentials.

Unlimited Save Groups

Tag any objects into a group and come back to them quickly at any time. Groups are easily visible with a colored tag on the object.

Get Rid Of Clutter

Too much non-sense in your scene? Hide all of those falloffs, cameras, lights, and other objects you aren't using with the Hide and Show buttons.

Seek

Search: First select if you are looking for an object/tag type or name then type it in and hit Search(or enter). The name search will find objects that contain the text you type. For example, searching "clone" will also find objects name "cloner". To find objects that match your search exactly use quotes around your search word.

-SHIFT + Search:  Adds the search to your current selection. 
-ALT + Search : will scroll to the object that is selected. This is useful for viewport selections.
-CMD/CTRL + Search: will find all similar objects to the object you have seleceted in the object manager or viewport and put it's name in the search bar.

More info and tips below on helpful keywords you can use when searching for objects. 

Hierarchy: If you want to search through just a specific heirarchy of objects rather then the whole scene check this and select the parent object whose heirarchy you want to search.

<  and  > : These buttons will cycle through the objects found one by one either forwards or backwards in the object manager. Usefull if things are spread out in the manager.

Delete Tags: This is button will delete tags that have been searched for since hitting the delete key will not delete them(C4D issue).

SOLO:  Just as you would expect it takes the selected objects and solo's them along with their children in the viewport and object manager to focus in on the objects you are working with. Just hit SOLO again to UNSOLO.

-CMD/CTRL or ALT  + Solo: Will not solo objects children

Hide

Hide/Show: Lets you hide/reveal the objects you are searching for. This is directly linked to the objects you type into the search bar.

-CMD/CTRL + Show: will force the object to be visible(green traffic lights).
-ALT + Hide/Show: will hide or show any selection you have in the object manager.
-CMD/CTRL + ALT + Show: will force any object selection to be visible(green traffic lights).

Viewport and Render: Checkboxes to specify if you want objects hidden/unhidden from the viewport or render or both.

All: This will hide or reveal all object found in your search.

Selected:  This will only hide/show the objects of the type you are searching for(in the search box in SEEK) and have selected in the object manager.

Un-Selected: This will hide/show the unselected objects of the type you are searching for(in the search box in SEEK) and have selected in the object manager. This is usefull if you want to hide, for example, all of the effector falloff besides the one you are working with, or hide all of the lights but the ones you have selected.

Store

If you keep coming back to multiple objects often then putting them into a group is an easy way to reselect the group without having to hunt them all down each time.

How it works: Set the dial to a number, this will be your group number. A random color is associated with each group number automatically (you can set your group color if you want by clicking the colored box). Hit Save to tag your object selection with the current color and group number. Then when you want to come back to it just set the dial to the group number you want to select and hit load and it will restore your selection. You can easly add more objects to the group by selecting them and hitting save again. Save will only add, never replace. The Remove button will remove all objects from the group. If you only want to remove certain objects from the group then just delete the colored tag on the object. You can also copy the colored tags to other objects to include them in the group.

-Selecting a group tag and ALT + Load will select that group.
-Selecting a group tag and ALT + Remove will remove that group.
-Setting the number dial to 0(zero) and hitting load will load selections from all groups and hitting remove will remove all objects from all groups.

Selection Object: Just another way to store your objects in their own group if the tagging system isn't what your looking for. All of your selected objects will be put into a selection object which you can then double click on in the object manager to restore the selection.

Message

You will see messages relating to what you are doing or errors if you have done something wrong. It will let you know things like how many objects were selected, added or removed from groups and also things like object names when cycling through objects with the arrow buttons so you don't have to take your eyes off the plugin.

Searching Tips

There are a few of specific words and custom keywords that will help you find objects much quicker and easier. These were designed to be intuitive so you don't have to remember anything besides the basics of how it works which is found below.


  • Nothing is case sensitive so don't worry if about if you should or shouldn't put that capital letter in.
  • Nothing needs to be plurarlized so don't worry about putting an "s" at the end of your search, but it will not change anything if you do.
  • Every search will search for an object unless the word "tag" comes after to indicate you are looking for a tag.
  • You can search for groupings of objects like Effectors, Forces, Deformers, Mograph, ect. The full list of words and what the objects in them are will be found in the next section.
  • You can search for Enabled(green checkmark) or Disabled(Red X) objects of a certain type by putting those words before the object. Ex. "Enabled Cloners", "Disabled Deformers", "Enabled Area Lights", ect.
  • Like the previous tip you can search for Visible or Hidden(or "Invisible") objects which mean if the traffic lights are red or not. Ex. "hidden splines", "visible spheres", ect.
  • There are three special keywords. "Active Camera" is for finding the active camera in the scene(has the white square target next to it in the object manager). "Missing Texture Tags" will select all texture tags that have no material associated with them indicated by a "?" on the tag. "Editable Splines" will select any spline that have been converted to be editable.
  • Some objects have multiple search words to allow a more intuitive search. So, again, don't worry too much about if you have the official program name or spacing between words like that. For example searching "Bone" and "Joint" will find the same thing. If you type "polygon" or "polygon object" in your search it will select geometry that has been converted to be editable since this will be the most common use for the search. There is also a polygon object that is a primitive, the search for that would be "polygon primitive". Other objects like cube, sphere, capsule do not need the word primitive after it.

Object Grouping Keywords

These are the object groupings you can search for and the objects associated with them. This just for your information. Most of the grouping keywords would behave like you would expect.


  • "Effectors" = Selects all effectors.
  • "Lights" = Selects all light types. Specific light types can be searched as well. Ex. "area lights", "spot lights", ect.
  • "Primitives" = Selects all primitive objects(not converted to polygons).
  • "Splines" = Selects all spline objects(but not the spline effector or spline deformer). Typing "Editable Splines" will select any splines that are editable.
  • "SDS" = Selects all of the Subdivision Surface objects: Subdivision Surface, Extrude, Lathe, Loft, Sweep, Bezier, Cloth Surface.
  • "Deformers" = Selects all deformers.
  • "Mograph" or "Mograph Objects" = Selects core mograph elements: Cloner, Matrix, Fracture, MoInstance, MoText, Tracer, MoSpline, Voronoi Fracture.
  • "Forces" = Selects all Forces.
  • "Character Objects" = Selects these character objects: Character, CMotion, Joint, Skin, Muscle, MSkin, Cluster, Point Cache, Weight Effector.
  • "Hair Objects" = Selects Hair, Feathers, and Fur objects.
  • "Constraints" = Selects Connector, Spring, Motor, and Force objects.
  • "Sounds" = Selects Loudspeaker, Microphone, and Stereo Microphone objects.
  • "Generators" = Selects Array, Atom Array, Boole, Spline Mask, Connect, Instance, Metaball, Symmetry, Construction Plane.
  • "Dynamics" = Selects Dynamic Body tags, Spline Dynamics tags, and Cloth tags.


        3rd Party Plugins


  • "XP" or "XParticles" = Selects all XParticles objects including tags. If you want just objects or tags use "xp tags" or "xp objects". To only select modifiers type "xp modifiers". For xp material tags only use "xp texture tags".
  • "Vray" = Selects all Vray objects including tags. If you want just objects or tags use "vray tags" or "vray objects". For vray material tags only use "vray texture tags".
  • "Octane" = Selects all Octane objects including tags. If you want just objects or tags use "octane tags" or "octane objects".

Additional Tips

  • When solo is activated it temporarily places objects into a new layer. When you un-solo it will put the objects back into the original layer. If you have multiple layers with the same name it may get confused and put objects into the wrong layer. Make sure your layer names are uniqe(as they should be!).
  • If you have a tag selection typed in the search bar with "heirarchy" checked you can drag select a group of any tags and hit "delete tags" to delete only that type of tag. Allows for quick and specific removing of certain tags.
  • When you do a tag search the attribute manager will not display any parameters unless you already had a tag selected to begin with(an unfortunate C4D limitation). So if you want to manipulate the tags you just selected as a group you can just Cmd/Ctrl+Click any tag twice and the tag attributes will show up since C4D is now in tag mode. Alternatively just have a tag selected before you hit search.

For further questions or comments contact:   joren@thepixellab.net
Thank You!