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Setting Polygons/Polygon Clusters Visibility Options

You can control view and render visibility both polygon clusters and selections of polygons on an object.

Setting Visibility for Polygon Clusters

You can apply a visibility property to a polygon cluster to control whether the cluster appears in the viewports and rendered image. This is useful when you want to animate the cluster’s visibility settings.

To set visibility for a polygon cluster

1. In a 3D view, select a polygon cluster.

2. From any toolbar, choose Get > Property > Polygon Cluster Visibility to apply a visibility property to the polygon cluster.

When you apply the visibility property, the cluster’s view and render visibility is automatically disabled.

3. With the cluster still selected, click the Selection button in the Select panel and click the Visibility node’s icon in the pop-up explorer.

4. In the Visibility property editor that opens, select or deselect visibility for the cluster as required:

- View Visibility for showing the selected object in the 3D views. This is useful if you want to clean the area around the render region in a 3D view. Turning off View Visibility does not affect the rendered image.

- Render Visibility for showing the object in the rendered image. This overrides all other settings in the Rendering controls.

Setting Visibility for Selected Polygons

You can control the visibility of selected or unselected polygons by making them “Invisible” rather than creating a cluster and applying a visibility property to it. The hidden polygons are invisible for both viewing and rendering.

This is useful for temporarily hiding selections of polygons. For example, if you have one object inside of another, you can hide some of the outer object’s polygons, rather than hiding the object outright, and place the inner object properly.

You can also display invisible polygons in the viewports without unhiding them. Though they are partially visible for viewing, they are not rendered.

To hide selected/unselected polygons

1. Select a group of polygons on an object.

2. Do one of the following:

- Press h or choose Display > Hide/Unhide Selection from the main menu bar to hide the selected polygons.

or

- Choose Display > Hide and Deselect from the main menu bar to hide the selected polygons and deselect them.

or

- Press Ctrl+Shift+h or choose Display > Hide Unselected Objects/Polygons from the main menu bar to hide all unselected polygons.

The selected polygons are hidden in all geometric views but remain visible in the explorer (an H appears on the icon of the node to which the polygons belong). Hidden polygons are not rendered in the render region nor do they appear in the final output.

To unhide invisible polygons

• Do one of the following:

- If the polygons are selected, press h or choose Display > Hide/Unhide Selection from the main menu bar.

or

- If the polygons are not selected, press Ctrl+h or choose Display > Unhide All Polygons from the main menu bar.

To display invisible polygons

• From the eye icon menu in any viewport, or the Show menu in an object view, choose Invisible Components. The hidden polygons are displayed with the following visual cues to identify them as invisible:

- The wireframe of invisible polygons is a dashed line instead of a solid line.

- In shaded viewing modes, the invisible polygons’ shading is half-tone.

When invisible polygons are displayed this way, you can select them in the 3D views, which is handy if you want to make them visible again.

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