I was wondering if there is a way to have nested groups in blender. Unfortunately even after some search, I failed to find much on the topic other than a paid add-on for 40$.
It would be really nice if I could group stuff in my scene as follows:
Forest
Terain
Forest
Trees
Berries
Wolves
House
Building
John (character)
Objects <-- This can become a mess
As far as I see, grouping items just kind of mitigates the issue, but I quickly end up with a big chunk of groups as well.
Parenting is also weird since it requires to have a parent that I need to manipulate, so again, I can’t click one tree and expect to move them all together.
Is there any way that I am missing to organize a scene? Something like the nested layers in photoshop for instance?
I was wondering if there is a way to have nested groups in blender. Unfortunately even after some search, I failed to find much on the topic other than a paid add-on for 40$.
If it was easy in blender then there wouldn’t be an addon to do this.
You cannot add groups to other groups.
You can parent objects to empties and empties to other empties
Parenting is also weird since it requires to have a parent that I need to manipulate, so again, I can’t click one tree and expect to move them all together.
What does this mean. You can select groups of objects in the outliner
As a matter of fact I am not even able to create a single level of groups. When I select a number of parts of a complex object and press Command_G, the function seems to work fine, but when I try to move the object, just the single part I grabbed moves, like no grouping occurred. What did I do wrong?
Blender doesn’t have Groups. What you are doing is adding a bunch of objects to a Collection. I’d suggest taking a look at the free MACHIN3Tools addon. It costs $1 at that link for I think admin reasons, but you can find it at Gumroad.
It allows you to have Ctrl+G create groups. You can then shift+double click on any member of the group to select the group and additionally adds some right-click menu items for working with groups.
If you are wanting just to work within Blender’s default Collection system there are workarounds. Collections are great for organising scenes. You can select any member of the Collection, press Shift+G and then Collection to select all the other members of the Collection for example.
So it seems that plain blender just has the possibility of having sort of soft groups. You define them and then click a part and then control G to select all its elements. Quite weird and prone to error indeed. I really wonder why such a distinctly modular and scalar program does not allow to complete a work and then use it as a commodity by grouping all its parts. By paying the $1 addendum you get the possibility of having standard hard groups like for any other graphics program?
So much so that keeping all object separated is a pain in the heck for any action on them with spinning ventilator waiting indicator. I have a railway composed of hundreds of tracks and a train composed of about two parts and each time I do something is like a helicopter lands!
The addon is free if you get it on Gumroad. I only posted the Blender Market ($1) link as I had it to hand and some amount of Blendermarket stuff goes back into the Blender Development Fund.
Have you considered just parenting objects appropriately instead? That might be more suitable for a mechanical model. That is, in effect, what the addon I mentioned does under the hood. Create an empty. Parent objects to the empty. Name the empty. Now you have one group. Rinse and repeat. The addon is quicker, makes adding and removing objects to groups easier, hides the actual empties when not selected and makes selecting all members of a group easier/quicker. Even with vanilla Blender working with parenting is now much easier than it used to be as you can drag and drop Objects in the Outliner to form relationships (hold down Shift to Parent)
Another possibility for complex models is using Collection Instances. Organise your objects by Collection. These can be kept in a different scene even. Then use Ctrl+A>Collection Instance and choose the appropriate Collection to add a fully grouped Instance of that Collection into the scene. Changes made in the objects it’s instanced from will update in the instanced copy.
If you’re coming from 3ds Max, SketchUp, or similar software, you might miss the ability to group objects Blender doesn’t have that natively. I built an addon called GRYD GroupFlow that brings that exact workflow to Blender: group objects together, work with them as a unit, and stay organized just like you would in other DCC tools.
It’s currently free during Early Access, so great time to grab it!
Check it out here: GRYD GroupFlow – Non-Destructive Object Grouping [Free Early Access]
