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I'm sorry if it's something basic, but I really don't know which keywords to look for, so I have to ask.

Say I'm making an interior scene. I have three different types of chairs, three different types of tables, and two different types of plants. I would like to see different combinations thereof, before deciding which pieces of the furniture I would like to keep.

Is there an efficient way to switch between these objects, without having to manually toggle their visibility on and off?

Edit: thanks to Ben, I've defined an idea of what I would like. Is it possible to set up a dummy object like a cube that would contain, for example, all the chairs I want to test, and somehow cycle through them?

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2 Answers 2

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If you are still on Blender 2.79, you can use the Layer System for this. Simply assign the objects you want to view together to the same layer by selecting them in Object Mode, pressing M and then clicking the layer you want them to appear on.

Objects to Layers

Objects can appear in several layers, so if you wanted the same chair to be visible in multiple combinations, that can be done by adding it to multiple layers. You do this while holding Shift while assigning the layer.

Showing Layers

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  • $\begingroup$ Layers would work if I wanted to switch between Furniture Set A and Furniture Set B. That would help in some cases, so thanks for the tip. $\endgroup$
    – Daria Pavlenko
    Commented Mar 22, 2019 at 10:10
  • $\begingroup$ You can also make any other combination. Like in the example, where the cylinder is part of both sets (read: layers). The only limit is the number of layers, which AFAIK is 20. Isn't that what you asked for? $\endgroup$
    – Ben
    Commented Mar 22, 2019 at 10:19
  • $\begingroup$ The problem I see is that I would have to manually set up all the possible combinations by assigning objects to different layers. I might have more combination than there's layers, and finding the layer with the right combination might be tricky. $\endgroup$
    – Daria Pavlenko
    Commented Mar 22, 2019 at 10:23
  • $\begingroup$ If what you are after is ALL POSSIBLE combinations, you will need to go into scripting. It is doable that way, but that is out of my area of expertise. Try sifting through existing questions for abit, tho, this seems like a problem that may have come up before. $\endgroup$
    – Ben
    Commented Mar 22, 2019 at 10:28
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks, I will look into scripting - hopefully it will limit the search area. $\endgroup$
    – Daria Pavlenko
    Commented Mar 22, 2019 at 10:33
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Found a solution here - https://blendersushi.blogspot.com/2012/04/workflow-proxy-real-geometry.html

All of the furniture can be moved to another layer altogether to avoid clutter, then selected from the Outliner. It would probably be easier to parent different pieces to empties named Chairs, Tables etc so that the Outliner list is shorter.

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