Blender Needs a "New" way to Group Objects!!

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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Ok, I don’t rant very often. I’d rather be modeling and creating art but this just get’s my goose. :slight_smile: I recently created a model with a number of objects. I wanted to save this model with different categories for each part. For example the “WINDOW” group would have children that are: Window Casing, Window Frame and Window Glass. Then I would group all of these objects under a Parent named “HOUSE”. I would save this .blend file and could append “HOUSE” to any file when I needed this house.

Sounds simple but turns out it’s a mind numbing procedure in Blender. I tried Parenting, Grouping and Joining. All have their strengths but they all fail at some point making it very frustrating to Group and move objects and then to easily ungroup or edit them.

Parenting
For example “Parenting” objects is great as it let’s you see and edit the children in the outliner but you can’t “Append” the final Parent to another file. May Need Fixin!

Grouping
When you group objects you can selet a Group name than appending works well as you just select the Group name but: Try moving that group in the viewport. You can’t as all of the objects remain separate. May Need Fixin!

Joining
When you Join objects they can then e easily moved, but again Appending doesn’t work unless you select ALL objects separately. Not possible with huge files.
• When joining objects the last object selected becomes the name of the joined objects. Not very good.
• When you separate Joined objects (P Key) they lose their original names. This can be a real problem when you have lots of objects and you don’t want to manually rename everything.
•When you separate Joined objects (P Key) they lose their original axis location. This can be a real problem when you have lots of objects and you don’t want to manually reset the axis of every object. May Need Fixin!

Solution!!
I really hope Blender can implement a much simpler system that will replace it’s current Grouping, Parenting and Joining of objects. Something like Cinema 4D’s Null system would be ideal as it allows you to very easily add or remove children from a parent. It also allows you to easily see and edit each child while it’s in the Parented group while still allowing you to use the Parent to move all objects at once.

In Cinema 4D you can create an “Empty” (Called a Null Object) and then drag any number of objects onto it and they become “Children” of the “Empty” or Null object.

Then you can move the Null object and all children will follow. It’s also easier to edit the objects or remove them form the Parented group. All you need to do is select the object from the outliner and then drag it out of the Null object and it is no longer a child of the Null object. Can’t get much simpler than that. Adding the child object back to the Parent is just as easy, just drag it onto the Null object and Voila! it’s a child of the parent object.

After reading the WIKI and any information I could find on Parenting,Joining and Grouping I have come to the conclusion that this is one area of Blender that needs to be changed to be more like other apps. I love Blender but there is no simple way to group, edit and move objects in Blender. It is a very frustrating process that IMO need changing.

This Video Shows Just How Easy it Is in Cinema 4D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0c1JUjcvS8

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http://www.blenderstorm.org/

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Thanks Jay, but I already submitted this to: http://www.blenderstorm.org/

I still would be interested in some feedback from other users if I am out to lunch, if this something that in fact needs changing, or if there is in fact a way to do this already and I’m just not doing it right. :slight_smile:

pg

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Re: moving a group. If you have a Group of objects, Shift-G lets you select all members of the group (among other options).

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Grouping
When you group objects you can selet a Group name than appending works well as you just select the Group name but: Try moving that group in the viewport. You can’t as all of the objects remain separate. Failure!

Of course to move a group you just use Shift+G to select a group in the meantime.

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failure! failure!
Blender is a big failure!

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Hey it was said tongue in cheek! I Love Blender :slight_smile:

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+1 to this request.

I would also add that transforming grouped objects is unnecessarily complicated in Blender. It should be a rudimentary procedure but ends up being an exercise in quantum mechanics.

The lack of a “normal way” to select and move groups of objects is like slapping wooden wheels on an Aston Martin - “Just don’t drive too fast ok?”

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With the exception of B-mesh I think this would be by biggest request to see in Blender. It would help the work flow for all kinds of users.

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this really looks like parenting, except it was made via outliner.

ps: once more endi wasn’t funny :no:

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This is not as easy a solution as C4D but here’s a thought.

How about using a mixture of a couple of approaches?

Try adding an empty and making it the parent of the 3 objects (like your example). Then make a group that includes all items plus the empty (ctrl G and rename to something meaningful).

This will allow you to append this as a group and when moving the group you simply use the empty (you could rename the empty to window parent for example)

This way the parent relation to the empty is kept intact and object centers aren’t changed.

Here’s a link to a blend file in case my description doesn’t make sense. http://www.mediafire.com/?bvn7mb947aciz71

hope this helps!

p.s. oh and of course set the search type to “groups” in the outliner

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As you note:

Parenting sounds like a good solution that already exists for transforms… as for the appending issue groups serve admirably…

why not do both? the parenting will be nice for the outliner view and transforms, the group will be good for appending! it’s also available now!

if it’s too much “bother” to do repetitive tasks then look into python scripting. this sort of macro (to do parenting and add a group as a one step command) is pretty trivial!

drag and drop parenting in the outliner is a very desirable feature, but hardly an “unknown” request for the dev team I’m sure!

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Even without creating a group.
File browser allow to append several objects at a time.
And in that case, relationship is preserved.

Blender has got many ways to select objects (by type, by layers,by naming pattern…). Parenting is not allways needed for quick selection.

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:eyebrowlift2::eyebrowlift2: I could need some more failures of this genre in my existence! I’d be glad! :yes::yes:
:smiley:

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Yet, Paint Guy is right when asking for a more straight away manner to push and pull a group around in a scene.
I mean: a group is a group. There should be no need of any extra keyboard shortcut for that. Once a group is selected, it is logical to want it behave like a group.
The Empty, by essence, should actually be usable as any Null (Maya, C4D, and others) moving an Empty will transmit everything to the parented children… Why should it not be able to have 1 or thousands of groups as children?

EDIT: Is multi-parenting actually possible in Blender (having shared parentings)?

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For all I know, all those things you mention as a solution can already be done in blender á la cinema 4D style except not by drag n drop (at the moment).

As you say, the solution consists in having an empty as parent. So I’m a little bit curious about where the ideas for the other things, especially grouping and joining, comes from?
Are these doable in Cinema 4D?

As for grouping, this has been mentioned before me, use shift+g
And for things regarding joining, it seems most of it seems to come down to how blender handles object data and mesh data. When you join two objects, they become one, i.e. they are one mesh object. Thus names from the conjoined objects are lost as one object can only have one name. Same thing for axis location, orientation & size.
This is actually something that should be expected and appropriate behavior IMO. And I can’t see you mentioning a solution to this either.

Lastly, I would really like to know why you would want to join mesh objects with an empty. Sure, it may seem like a trivial thing to do but I just can’t see why one would do that :confused:. The only thing that comes to mind is that you want the null object to be the placement as the new object center.
An empty object, or null object, should be just that; empty. If you where able to join a mesh object with an empty, one of the two objects have to be converted to the other data type. Either the mesh object have to convert to a null object (removing all mesh data) or the null object would have to convert to a mesh object which would prove pointless since it would only contain the same mesh data as the object(s) it is joining with. Joining a mesh with an empty is therefore effectively the same as deleting the null object.

So I hope you get why I’m curious to your way of workflow :wink:
Hope it helps

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What do you think about this ?

You can do multi-parenting with Child of Constraint. An object can be part of several groups.

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I must say this is very unintuitive. At first (and I see myself still as a novice blender user) when I used grouping I was also expecting that when I select something from the group and move it, the others would follow. As you would expect from a group. I just think that is how the mental model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_model) works for most people.

But I use a workaround. Create an empty and parent the objects of the group to it, move the empty and voila. It also helps me to “layer” stuff in the outliner.

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Not really. For example if you have parented some objects and you want to copy (Append) those objects to a new file this can’t be done using Parenting. Basically if the developers allowed Groups of Parented objects to be copied (appended) to another file this would be the closest to Cinema 4D example and IMO would fix the problem!! :slight_smile: Also, allowing "Drag and “Drop” functionality in the Outliner so you could drag objects to make them “children” of an Empty in the would be a great feature! :slight_smile:

Another thing I’d like to see changed is selecting objects in the Outliner. You only see the “first” item selected and not subsequent items. It would be better if all items you selected would be highlighted.

I agree, I just meant “joining” isn’t the answer to what I was trying to achieve which is (objects that can be grouped, moved and appended and still be easily edited like in the C4D video above) I think Blenders “joining” is great already for what it was made to do so I am not saying it should be changed. :slight_smile:

You are correct.

I agree. If you “Group” a number of objects they don’t “join” together as a group in the viewport or in the Outliner, so “Grouping” doesn’t act like you would expect it to act.

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Wow,

You guys don’t use dupligroup? That’s what it is for.

Create an empty. Activate dupligroup and type in the name of your group. Now when you select any part of the group you get the whole thing.

Blender is not broken, it just works as it does.