Can SEOs be suspended?

[Bill]

I have used SEO to carve a corner away from a model of a building, allowing a glimpse inside the building while keeping it an exterior 3d view. I did this by putting a large slab on a separate SEO layer, performing the operation with the slab on a number of elements, and then turning off the SEO layer... voila, looks great.

I want to also be able to see the whole building, though, without the carving, in separate view Is there a way to suspend the operation of the SEO? If not, I guess I'll have to delete the slab and then do a new SEO each time.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

Bill

[Bill]

OK, you've blown MY mind... how do you place the marquee in 3D?

[Anonymous]

In the 3D window (of course) the marquee tool will have a popup for geometry methods (in plan it's the one where you chose the rectangle or polygon).

The 2D form you're probably familiar with. The others allow you to draw a 3D marquee as a rectangle or polygon.

The first clicks will define the base shape and the final one determines the height. As I mentioned the base will be set at the current user origin and the final click can go up or down from there. You can snap to points in the model or just freehand it (though it can be hard to tell the extents sometimes), and you can also magic wand (spacebar click) to a slab or such.

It is still limited to a horizontal rectangular or polygonal prism (ie top and bottom level with all sides vertical). For diagonal cuts you can use the (ancient) cutting planes dialog. For really complicated stuff you might still need SEOs.

Back in version 10 there was a quirk (I thought it was a feature ) that elements on layers set to an intersection priority of zero would not participate in SEOs. This provided the equivalent on a selective suspend SEO function. Being reminded of this, I have just added a wish for it's return here.

[rocorona]

Save the Slab as an Object and use it as the SEO Operator.
Edit the Object adding a boolean parameter, call it "hidden".
Then add this, as the first row in the 3D Script:
IF hidden THEN END

This way you can switch the operation on and off.

[Anonymous]

Roberto, what a grate tip! Thanks.

[Barry Kelly]

rocorona wrote:
Save the Slab as an Object and use it as the SEO Operator.
Edit the Object adding a boolean parameter, call it "hidden".
Then add this, as the first row in the 3D Script:
IF hidden THEN END

This way you can switch the operation on and off.

And as Duane suggested this could be controlled through the MVO settings for objects.
There is a bit more scripting involved to do this.

The advantage of the MVO setting is that MVOs are saved with your views so you can just creat a new MVO combination and set your duplicate model view to use it (i.e on view with it on and another with it off).
No need to turn object parameters on or off as the MVO will do that for you.

But if you just want it for visualisation purposes in the 3D model then it is probably not worth it - just have a parameter in the slab object that you can turn on/off manually.

Barry.