Branch Open/Close Tools

Funny thing, those tree branches. One should expect that opening or closing (folding) whole branches at once would be a common problem, which asks for a common solution (like double-clicking the plus/minus symbol). But nooo, C4D itself offers only the standard folding icons, and a menu item for folding and unfolding the whole tree. I have not even found a free plugin for finer control, except one that opens a whole branch (but does not close it...). So, maybe you never missed this functionality? Hey, I implemented it nevertheless!

What problem do they solve?

As stated above, you can fold or unfold branches in C4D only by the little plus or minus icons left to the object name (if the object has children). Or you can open the whole tree. But what happens if you want to open a branch, including its children, to get a better overview of the structure of the model? Either you unfold a lot of branches with a lot of clicks, or you clutter your object tree by opening everything.

How do they work?

The plugin commands "Fold branch" and "Unfold branch" take care of that. Here are their symbols:

Fold BranchUnfold Branch Symbols for the folding and unfolding commands

Unfold unfolds the selected object, and its children, and their children... until the whole branch is open. (So far, it does the same as the plugin I mentioned above.)

Fold folds the selected object, and its children, and... you get the idea. This does not seem to make much sense, since a click on the minus icon already folds the branch so you can't see all those children - but when you reopen the branch, you will see the difference.

Both commands work with multi-selections as well.

Now, sometimes you definitely don't want to open everything in the tree. For example, on the lowest level, there may be a structure you don't want to see, like the splines in a loft, or the bones in a hand, or the basic polygon objects of a hypernurbs, or the object cluster within a boolean structure. You want to open the branch... but not these elements. The opening should stop at the level of the loft, or the hand, or the hypernurbs, or the boolean.

For this case, there is a stop tag in the Collie Tools. Select the tag "Collie Tools - Block Folding". Assign it to the object where the folding should stop. It does stop both the folding and unfolding recursion, so that the children of that object will not be affected by the commands. (If you use the commands on an object which bears the tag directly however, the tool will assume that you want to override the tag. This is what you would naturally expect.)

Block folding tag Symbol for the Block Folding tag

Many words for a simple something. Try the demo scene branch_open_close to see how it works. Don't bother with the 3D view, the cubes are all in one place... observe the tree structure in the object manager. Open a cube branch with the Unfold command, and see how the opening stops at the objects with the stop tag.

Three tips to use these commands and the tag:

First, it is very useful to have the command icons in a toolbar that is assigned to the object manager. If you need to go through the plugin menu every time you want to open a branch, the usefulness of the commands is easily lost. As you can see in the screenshot here, I keep the icons close at hand.

Icons in object manager

Second, you can use the stop tag to depth-group assemblies. Use the stop tag where a super-assembly stops, and where the child-assemblies start. Then each branch unfolding command will reveal a whole assembly substructure. I found this kind of structuring extremely useful in work.

And third, the Block Folding tag is used in the Named Structures as well. Named Structures also allow you to control opening of the tree. Have a look at that topic too.


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