Unbinding items

jean.le_meur

Software : DS 4.6

How can I untie/unbind ( I don't know the exact word ) an item containing other items ?

I have bought The Big City, Stonemason's work, and it is a remarkable work. Regretfully, this city is *dirty*. Empty bottles and cans as well as papers everywhere on the sidewalks, gang tags on many walls... He probably had downtown Chicago or downtown Detroit in mind when he did it ;)

I want by some manner to clean the city by removing this, but he put them together, with other items I want to keep, in an unique item/file that I can't open. Could someone here help me ?

sriesch

In what way are the items combined?

If they are multiple objects saved together in the same scene, you could load that scene, delete all the objects you don't want, then resave it as a Scene subset.

If it is one object with multiple nodes that can't be split apart, but they still have different surfaces, you could set the surfaces' opacity (transparency) to 0 to make them invisible, then resave that as a scene subset.

If the dirt is something like grafitti on a wall, presumably it isn't modeled, it's part of the material. You would have to make a copy of that material and try to manually edit that out. That might be a LOT of work, or you might get lucky if you have something like a square building with one wall the way you want and a second wall with grafitti and both are separate surfaces; you could just copy the desired surface and paste it on top of the undesired surface, and save your modified scene or material.

jean.le_meur

Thank you for your fast reply.

Here is a screen print of the item I'm talking about ( and there is several items like this one, it's not the only one ) :

Big City

Stonemason could combine all these items into one single item/folder/file, so there is a way to do that ( now, maybe not using DS... ), and if there is a way to do it, there also is a way to undo it.

And the gang tags are simply items ( artfully ) pined against walls, they're not part of them.

kaotkbliss

wow, that's tiny and can't see it. Anyways I have all of Sronemason's Urban Future sets and if this one follows suit then each building, road, etc are separate pieces all parented.

So what you want to do is select the top item, right click and expand from selection to get the full list of objects.

Then you can either hide or unparent and delete what you don't want.

*edit*
Ahh you fixed the link, much better :)
You should be able to hide or delete the litter/garbage you just need to find it in that list. As for the graphiti, it's probably part of the texture as mentioned. So you would need to take the texture into a photo editor and remove them manually. (don't forget to save it with a new name so you don't overwrite the original)

jean.le_meur

Well, the image is not that tiny ;) and ImageShack is the one to be blamed.

The Big City I have is this one : Big City 2

and here is a larger ( attached ) screen shot :

scorpio

Very often items have a separate material zone and that can be set to 0% opacity in the surface tab to hide it.

kaotkbliss

I don't have that set unfortunately, but you should expand all the trees. Then you can go through each object in the set and find the ones you don't want (you can zoom in on a particular object by clicking the [ ] next to the view cube in the upper right)
When you find a particular object you want to remove click the eyeball to the left of the object's name in the scene tab and it will hide that object from the frame.

There is a chance that since the road decals are separate objects, the graffiti might be as well.

*edit*
I know the trash in my urban future set was a separate object, so it's likely it is in yours as well.

*another edit*
Here's a street view of mine. The first shows the garbage decal as it is by default, the 2nd screenshot shows I've hidden it and cleaned up the streets.

jean.le_meur

Well, thank you all for the replies. It is a pity the only answer you could give me is a trick, when a ( non-documented ) way to do that exists... but you're not to blame. Thanks again.

Scavenger

If I understand correctly, the question isn't "can I hide elements of a set?"

It's "A single element (U2SEProps2) has multiple different items in it. Jean Le Meur would like to be able to turn off SOME, but NOT ALL of the items in that single element (U2SEProps2) , but it does not expand in the scene tab to show the different items. Is there a way this can be done?"

I ran into this same thing earlier...can the single elements...shown as a cube with no expansion triangle...be drilled into?

kaotkbliss

@Scavenger
He stated he wanted to remove the litter and graffiti from the set. I have other Stonemason sets but not that one and in the ones I have with litter, the litter prop is a separate object parented to the main scene (or rather one of the buildings which are also parented to the main scene)
Which is why I kept telling him to expand the entire tree for that set because it's probably in there somewhere and all he needs to do is hide it or right-click and remove from scene.

The graffiti may or may not be part of the texture.

Anyways, in answer to your post
if it is the case where the litter is actually part of another object, then he would need to export the model to an editor like Hexagon (which is what I used to cut pieces out of a model)

I've only done this once and it was the first time I ever messed with Hex (So it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out) but I was able to export an object to Hex and delete all the faces I didn't want, then send the new object back into Daz. The problem is the original textures won't fit the new model anymore, so all new textures will need to be made.

Richard Haseltine

The graffiti is handled with decals, extra layers of geometry, but I think they cover the whole range of applied layers - they are, however, split by materials. The same is true to an extent with the clutter - theer isn't a single rubbish prop that can be removed without removing desired street furniture, but the props are divided by materials.