First of all - this is a honest question. I simply don’t get, even after now years of working in Blender.
The Drag’nDrop of objects in the outliner is an unsolved mystery to me. When do I need to select the hierarchy too when moving it inside the Outliner and when not? Sometimes I have to press Shift, sometimes Ctrl+Shift…
Let’s assume this structure:
Collection A
—|_ Empty A
------|_ Object A1
--------|_ Object A2
Collection B
—|_ Empty B
-----|_ Object B1
--------|_ Object B2
In nearly all cases I want to move a hierarchy from one object into an other (Empty B incl. Children to Empty A), parenting it, but keeping the hierarchy of the moved objects intact. Sometimes I just want to move hierarchies from one object/empty or collection into a different collection. (Empty B incl. Children to Collection A or Object B1 incl. children to Collection A)
My problem - I don’t get the pattern:
Dragging Object B -only this selected, Shift pressed- onto CollectionA results in
Collection A
—|_ Empty A
-----|_ Object A1
--------|_ Object A2
Collection B
—|_ Empty B
—|_ Object B1
-----|_ Object B2
moving the hierarchy outside the object, but NOT into the collection.
Doing the same with the full hierarchy selected results in:
Collection A
—|_ Empty A
-----|_ Object A1
--------|_ Object A2
Collection B
—|_ Empty B
—|_ Object B1
—|_ Object B2
killing the hierarchy.
Not holding Shift only moves the parent to the destination collection (child objects greyed out in destination). Especially this one is a concept I don’t get; what does the geyed out objects belong to? Is Object B2 now a child of Object B1 or of Empty B?
Collection A
—|_ Empty A
-----|_ Object A1
--------|_ Object A2
-----|_ Object B1
--------|_ Object B2 (greyed out)
Collection B
—|_ Empty B
-----|_ Object B1 (greyed out)
--------|_ Object B2
Is there any simple rule helping understand how all this works?
Hello,
Yes it is not always clear how this works. But the thing to keep in mind is that Collection and “Parenting” are a completely separate things.
When you press shift and drag Object B1 on Empty A, then the object becomes a child of the empty, but the object is still in the Collection B, that’s why it is greyed out.
If you select multiple objects and then move them with shift, each one of them will become a child of the new parent. And because an object cannot have multiple parents, the hierarchy has to be broken and all the objects end up at the same level of the hierarchy.
If you just drag and drop Object B1 without shift, you move the object to the Collection A. As you only clicked on Object B1, only this one will be in Collection A. Object B2 is still a child of Object B1 so it displayed, but it is still in Collection B so it is greyed out.
The summer this up, I would say that greyed out means not part of the collection.
Drag and drop without shift move object from a collection to another.
Drag and drop with shift parents the selected objects to the parent you drop them on.
Is there a way to move objects from one collections hierarchy into the hierarchy of an other collection in one step? Meaning parenting objects to objects in other collections and moving them into that collection at the same time.
Currently I parent the objects and have to move them in a separate step into the new collection.
