I have a mechanical object comprised of a number of different pieces that I need to animate. What is the easiest/best method to “group” it so I can animate it all turning.
Is there a way to group it for animation while still allowing it to be easily ungrouped if need be?
I’m not sure I understand your problem but perhaps, instead of grouping, you could do some kind of hierarchy between all your subparts like a rig, so that you just need to move the root object and your whole model will follow but if you want to rotate a subpart for instance, just select it and rotate it.
But maybe it’s not what you were looking for …
What I mean is how do you group or lock a number of objects together and then select the group and rotate them. For example with this motor all of the parts are separate pieces. Is there a way to “connect” or “group” them and then rotate the whole object as one piece.
OK, I think I figured it out. You create an “empty” and then you first select the objects you want to rotate and then last you select the “Empty” and then select (CTRP + P) Set Parent to Object. 