View (show/hide) flags for steps in Design timeline

[cekuhnen]

Is there a way to tell Fusion what to show in each design step in the Design Time Line?

It is annoying when you go back in time and have to turn on off parts constantly.

It would be nice that lets say after a split only certain parts are visible and at a mirror function other parts are only visible.

Nothing visible here when I go back in time:

Last step visible when I go forward in timeline:

Here you can see in each step 1 and 2 I selected different parts to be visible

and in image 3 when I went back one step everything is blank hidden again.

I think the time line only makes really sense when visibility and design results can be shown in steps when browsing also backwards not only forward!

Here is a video showing that till the end the scene is empty when playing the build animation:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byzv_NlyKp_2UkhiMUhFblFSSWM/edit?usp=sharing

[jeff_strater]

This is a good suggestion.  Others have noticed this in another context:  For a "cut" feature, we determine what is cut by visibility.  If a body/component is visible, and intersects the tool body, that body is cut.  This works OK for feature creation, but if you edit the feature, and other bodies are visible, this can change the result of the feature.

I have a follow-up question:  Would you expect to see visibility changes actually exist in the timeline as "features"?  If so, then it would be clear that the visibility is changing at these steps, and the visibility feature could be deleted/edited.  The downside of this would sometimes be too many visibility items in the timeline.

Or, we could potentially add a kind of "visibility snapshot" feature that captures the visibility of components/sketches/bodies/work geometry only at critical times (like we do with component position), or is created at a user's request.

thanks,

Jeff Strater (Fusion development)

[cekuhnen]

It is a tricky thing.

Because the timeline has an animation play function the show hide concept has to be refined.

Otherwise the play tool is useless when many steps remain invisible at that frame.

But I can also see the problem with too many hide flags inside the design timeline.

I think the snapshot idea you proposed is a good compromise.

What you really do not want is go to a step see nothing visible and then go to the browser to see

what objects are present and what can be turned visible.