GroupPro, group instances made easy

ok, pitiwazou - I watched your changes and they look way better and give better workflow than it is now.
I would group delete and cleanup, move it to bottom of bottom pie and add space like bondnaruto mentioned - it should not be that big.
I will probably remove (all) suffix from open and close - they make the buttons less readable (I will leave shift click behavior in description).
pitiwazou - can you share your changes?

Ok, Iā€™ll send you the file :wink:

Thanks pitiwazu, I put you changes into GP plus some bugfixes:
Update 1.1.6:

  • updated ctrl-x pie (thanks to pitiwazou)
  • fixed - setting group origin (child of group would move, now they stay at place). Also made it work on multiple selected objects at once.
  • added - ā€˜Bounding Box Bottomā€™ option - for setting group origin at bottom center of group.
  • Ctrl+V - paste hotkey operator will now clean group objects automatically when pasting group into new blend file.
  • Shift + D - duplicate hotkey operator will now make new duplicate groups unique automatically. Use Alt+D for instancing groups.

I do not like idea of overriding blender default hotkeys, because if more people start to do this in theirs addon, thing may work in unexpected ways, but for now I implemented the hotkey overrides anyway.

Brilliant interface update and bugfix is amazing , thanks pitiwazou and JoseConseco of course:) You can hit me, but i have some suggestions about button location optimizationā€¦:slight_smile: First of all, i think menu must appear more quickly, like was earlier, a little space between buttons look great thats why i have some suggestions about it


I prefer the right side ^^

Some weird GroupPro behavior in certain situation

Video example - https://cloud.mail.ru/public/JDEG/tsmFquFNs
Blend file - https://cloud.mail.ru/public/2e7u/V8rYfvn26

I will check that, but no promises of fixing this bug. GP was never officially supporting animations, I think you were just lucky, that nothing broke in you earlier animations. One workaround would be to instead of editing your animated group directly, first crate instance of it - and work on cloneā€¦

@bondnaruto - sorry for late repy. I noticed if you unparent broken elements (alt+p - clear parent), and then parent them back again to group it works ok. No sure whyā€¦

In that scene this not working, but working just open and close group 2 times. Letā€™s assume for now that this is a mystery:)

Iā€™m interested in your addon, but with Blender 2.8 coming soon, what is the roadmap?
I know 2.8 will have collections and no longer groups, but will GroupPro behave more or less the same as in 2.7, or will it become obsolete?

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I answered similar question in here:

I donā€™t use 2.8 too much so Iā€™m not sure what are other improvements are in managing groups, but I do plan to update GP to 2.8. And fix parenting error, that happens 1% of time - but this may require reworking whole addonā€¦ Other that that I think GP is feature complete. But I always listen to suggestions and add new stuff, if it doesnā€™t complicate the UX too much.

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Thank you for the answer :slight_smile:
Yes I saw your reply you quoted, but I wanted to know what exactly you think about GP and 2.8 specifically. Iā€™m sure youā€™ll find ways to improve the collections workflow in 2.8 with GP :grinning: Iā€™ll report any improvement I can think of. Keep it up!

great work on the update!

Group Pro continues to be the best group solution.

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Does this work with groupinstances from linked blendfiles? I coded myself some workflow tools that save groups into separate blend files and links them as instances. Would be nice to edit them without opening their blend files.

Nope. It wont open Group Instance it is linked from another file.
I tried to code it in past, but it was to hard for me to do back then. Maybe I will again in future. This operator would have to copy list of objects and its data between two blend files (copy modified objects from current blend to source blend).

Just made new introduction video, since old was old and I lost it, so I couldnā€™t upload it to youtube:

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Very cool addon , however i have an issue adding objects with contraints in group using group pro. Is there some workaround ? Thanks in advance

I canā€™t change constraints from python so they wonā€™t work well with GP. What you can try to do it so work on group with its cleared rotaton, translation, scale. Then setup the constraints, and close the group. Now they should work ok. If you want to edit it again just reset its position again before editing (or cult create alt+D instance of group, clear its transform and work on it).

This helps a lot! thank you.

I wanted to try the GroupPro addon for Blender 2.8 but I canā€™t find where the buttons are located in the UI.

Edit: I forgot to reload the factory settings. Now it shows the shortcut Ctrl + X to activate the GroupPro pie menu.