Well, this function is very useful and almost 3D apps have this, Unity never implement this, is strange, why?
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It does have an isolate function. You just havnt found it.
Well, it sort of has an isolate function… you can fix the inspector onto an item, however you can still select other items.
As a general rule it helps to explain exactly what functionality you are asking for. And why it would be of benefit. It isn’t immediately obvious (to me at least) what an isolate function would do…
I had to google it.
Isolate just means lock selection
It means hiding every other items (than selection) from the viewport.
And I’ve also have had use for this more than one.
Typing the object’s name in the search bar will fade all objects not fitting the criteria.
Hiding in the viewport, not the hierarchy window.
Edit: I want to stress that it is a work flow time save thing, something you would bind to a hotkey.
You could do that pretty easily with an editor extension (which can be mapped to shortcuts).
The quick and dirty way to do it would obviously be to grab all GameObjects in the scene, and disable the objects that aren’t the GameObject you have selected.
That comes with potential issues though, since it would unhide any objects that were hidden before you used the isolate function. You could pretty easily handle all of that though using the tools available to create editor extensions, it’s just going to take a little time to write the code.
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I see. That could be useful. Most of the time I do this by making the GameObject of concern a prefab, then editing the prefab in an empty scene. I acknowledge this is not as powerful as an isolate function.
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It doesn’t do exactly as requested, but certainly is a workflow helper. In fact, it might be something worth suggesting the developer, it wouldn’t be a huge delta from existing functionality.
Actually a little while ago I built a little tool to provide the functionality of Layer Comps in photoshop. You give it an object, and create a new state. That state stores the visibility of the children. You can have as many states as you want, each one with different visibility settings. Its helpful for an object that has a bunch of stacked.
Thinking more about the isolate function… it would be very useful. Though it may be a bit tricky to accomplish with editor scripting. You could get real close, but it could also pose some challenges. For instance if you choose to isolate an object inside a prefab, or need lights or have other editor scripts running that would affect it, like a layout element in the UI. You can’t hide the parents because you would see the object. You could move it out and turn things off, but that could bungle a prefab. For it to be really solid it would be best written in the editor itself.
Hmmm… I might mess around with this.
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I’m not quite sure if I’m right and don’t have Unity to check ATM but if you search by name it should white out everything else and maybe you can’t select it?
Not a good solution I know but a solution maybe.
Oh you mean in game? Yeah that’s not currently supported the closest thing I can think of would be to change layer of object and camera layermask.
Yea, there are a lot of edge cases that would present challenges. I think though, that even a limited version (like maybe it only works on objects in the scene root) could have some value.
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That sort of works, especially for visibility, but you can still select the dimmed objects.
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Thanks for your answers, i found a new and free asset that make exactly that i need Unity Asset Store - The Best Assets for Game Making then i not understand why Unity dont implement this natively.
Unity provides editor scripting and the asset store for just that reason. If the provided everything that everyone thought should be built the bloat would be crazy. (And even slower to update).
It’s cool to see someone added this and that it is free.
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Unity is lightweight, and when it comes to adding everything that should be directly implemented in the engine via C++ it becomes a bogged down mess… example c# editor addons like enhanced heirarchy… shits so slow polling editor changes with any meaningful amount of gameobjects in the scene you have to disable its usefulness otherwise kiss goodbye to quick responsiveness and ui scrolling.
the same goes for many other areas, I could forgive it not having isolate geo selection as unity doesn’t have anything in the way of builtin level/model editing features either, though its a pretty common stable in another other 3d modeling/animation software like 3ds, maya ooh and cryengine.
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Put it in as a feature request. It could simply be that no one has ever asked for it.
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Usually I am not a fan of everyone’s pet requests for “should” be built in. But, yea, this is one of those things that would be a win.
It definitely hits my criteria for low hanging fruit. Easy to implement, high value for cost, low side effects.
I’m enough of an engineer to know this doesn’t mean it’s a must implement now idea. But it is enough to make it worthy of going on a list somewhere for future consideration.
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