- [Instructor] The Scene Explorer
is one way to visualize your scene and it is based around
the transform hierarchy of that scene.
So, for example, if an object is linked to another object
it'll be displayed as subordinate in the Scene Explorer.
There's a parallel way to visualize the contents
of your scene and that's using display layers
and that's done in a window called the Layer Explorer.
And that's actually a more of a high level situation
in which it's not directly tied to the scene hierarchy
or the transform hierarchy
and it will allow you to do things
like hide or freeze bunches of different objects
or different hierarchies all at once.
Let's open up the Layer Explorer.
It's got a button on the main toolbar,
Toggle Layer Explorer.
Now by default it's going to appear
at the bottom of the command panel
but this is really not helpful
because we need a lot more real state
to be able to see what's going on in here.
So I want to drag this off to a floating window.
Currently, I've got my user interface locked
so I'll need to unlock it.
I'll go to customize and disable lock UI layout.
I can click on the grab bar for that Layer Explorer
and drag it out, make it larger
and then re-lock my user interface,
customize lock UI layout out.
The Layer Explorer is a variation on the Scene Explorer.
We can do a lot of the same things.
We can hide or freeze whole groups of objects
or whole collections of objects at once.
So, for example, I've got a layer
in here already for the walls
and I can click on its visibility
and that will hide all the walls in my scene.
I can dolly back here my front view, Control + Alt
and middle mouse.
So we can see that.
We can enable all the walls
or disable all the walls at once.
Likewise, just as we could in the Scene Explorer,
we can freeze things
and that's what the little snowflake icon is here.
Currently, the walls layer is frozen
so I can't select the walls, but if I just disable
that freeze icon now I can select all the walls.
Okay, so I can refreeze those walls.
Let's say I want to create a new layer.
I've got this light fixture here.
I'll create a layer for that.
Now I've created all these layers already,
but if an object has not been placed
into a layer by the user
then it will be in the default layer
and that's up here at the top.
Layer zero default open that up
and we can see that inside there
we've got the lamp geometry and also the lamp group
that we created in the other movie.
So I want to go ahead
and put all of these into their own layer.
So I'll select the first one lamp cord,
hold down shift and select the last one,
which is the group node and I'll create a new layer
and that's done from the toolbar up here.
We've got an icon with a plus sign, create new layer,
click on that and it's created
and given a default name Layer001.
The first thing I want to do here is rename this.
So I'll click on it and that'll highlight it
and I give it a name.
I'll call it fixtures and press enter.
Now notice that this new layer
has an icon that's highlighted in blue.
That indicates the current layer and the current layer
is going to be the recipient of any new objects
that we create.
So if I went and created something like a box
it would be dropped into this fixtures layer.
That's usually not what you want.
Generally, you want objects to be dropped
into the default layer.
So as a matter of practice, whenever you create a new layer
you're probably going to want to then remember
to make the default layer active once again.
So I'll click on that icon
and now the next object
that I create will be dropped
into that default layer rather than the fixtures layer.
Membership of layers can be edited in multiple ways,
the easiest way is simply to drag and drop.
So, for example, I can click on this lamp cord
and just drag it up into the default layer
and there it's been moved or I can click on it
and move it back into the fixtures layer.
Just like in the Scene Explorer
there is a context sensitive right click menu called,
the quad menu that gives you access to a lot of commands.
Like, for example, if you want to select all the members
of a layer, all you need to do
is just right click on that layer's name
and from the quad menu choose select child nodes.
And now you've selected all the members there.
That's a basic introduction to the Layer Explorer.
In the next movie we'll look at using it
to control display properties.