How do I assign a surface/face to a node so I can hide just that surface in the scene pane? (solved)

I've been using FIlament a lot lately, and one of the issues is that things like eyeglasses don't always look right due to the opacity issues that seem to be inherent to filament. Depending on lighting angle they might look like sunglasses one second and clear the next depending on movement of the character in the lights. Even though they are clear lenses and even if the opacity is set to 0, the lenses will still cast a shadow on the face of the character.

I can obviously delete the geometry for the lenses with geometry editor, which is what I have been doing. But I was wondering if there is a better way. If I can assign just the lense faces to a separate node, then I could just click the hide icon in the scene pane. But I can't find any tutorial how to do this. I'm guessing it needs to be done in Hexagon as I can't find any way to do it with geometry editor. (When I tried with geometry editor, what it actually did was assign all the surfaces of the eyeglasses to just one node, even though I had only selected the lenses)

Also, I know I can assign faces to "selection sets" in geometry editor, but those are shown again as soon as the scene is reopened so its not really a solution. I want to be able to hide the surfaces in the scene, so that when I save a scene file with lenses hidden, they stay hidden. And when I want to show them again, to behave like "sunglasses" then I can simply unhide them, by clicking on the head node.