Hello
I noticed this video about setting up “grouping” from a 3D modeler at Industrial Light and Magic Andrew Hodgson and thought I would share in case there is a solution.
Before you say it “collections” is not the answer, 
please see video to help explain why.
I am looking for the same fix so I thought I would share the video here. Any help would be super helpful, thank you.
Thank you, I will give it a go.
So he is not correct about what collections are… really. Not the same as Maya layers at all.
The feature he is talking about where “everything is selected” when you select a group in Maya is an option that you turn on here:
This is actually confusing, annoying and in many cases problematic. Though I can see from his perspective, in his question, it is useful. But he is incorrect in stating that it is selected. It is not. It is only highlighted as a display feature. And this is why it can be confusing and problematic.
He is correct in saying this does not exist in Blender under an Empty.
It is correct that Blender Groups are not the same as Maya Groups. Collections are actually old Groups in Blender and they are not layers. Layers were removed and Collections took the place of them as Groups - to slightly over simplify.
It is a bad design.
From what I can see the above addon is not adding this feature to Blender. It is simply using Collections and Collection instances.
The best solution is in the original video. Which is parent to empty. But you don’t need that even. Just parent to an empty and you still have the option to transform the parent.
To select everything (for real - same as Maya) choose “select hierarchy”
Blender:
Maya:
It is true that just selecting the empty will not duplicate the hierarchy. You have to select it first.
Regards having access to thousands of objects in Blender, it can’t handle it anyway until it gets optimized… so there is that.
Using Collections and instances - if you can get away with duplicates - is the only way to deal with large data sets in Blender.
And even if duplication is not what you want, Collections and Collection instances is a better way to use this workflow. It will work almost exactly as Maya groups in many respects and not at all in other respects.
The way to do it is to create a Collection and simply add it as an instance. Editing the original Collection will edit the group instance. The group instance will have a transform. Not the ideal workflow in every case. But useful.
If you want to use collections as groups in a similar way, put an empty to be the transform parent in the collection. You can now duplicate the collection and have an empty parented within the collection as a duplicate. You can use Select Objects on the Collection or Select Hierarchy on the group. But you can easily duplicate the collection in the Outliner without selecting anything.
Hope this helps and please ask anymore questions. I am glad to help. Others more knowledgeable than me might have even better advise or addons.
Well I puit it also under the vid, I think a lot of the visualisation problems could be solved if the relationship lines would be:
a) give a different theme color than wireframe,
b) these lines have different colors when the paren is in selected and unselected state…
just a thought…
ok I tried it, here two versions how things could look:
code changes in the video descript migjht be also usefull for other relation lines
The solution to your initial question is Machin3tools’ grouping (which is actually just parenting objects to empties). This solution was created as response to Andrew Hodginson’s rant. You’ll see as you go through the topic from where it started: MACHIN3tools - #544 by MACHIN3
This is one aspect of Blender where I think that “the developers took a step backwards …”
I would say rather sideways and much much better. It is a vast improvement over 2.79.
Sideways I say because they completely ignored good solid concepts of Layers (which Blender had) and rather than replace with a better more proven system of layers, integrated it in a very clumsy way within Outliner.
A layer indication or display of some kind in Outliner would be an improvement over Maya for example. Because Maya layers and how it handles transforms and parenting can cause a great deal of confusion and actually it is a system that breaks real easy and you have to work extra hard to maintain.
But outside of an indication as to which layer something is in, Layers do no belong in Outliner. Granted, this is a display option. But with this option you are actively working with and managing layers in Outliner. I don’t think this is a good design.
But it is far better than 20 yaers with no way to name them (without an addon).
I would say rather sideways and much much better. It is a vast improvement over 2.79.
Sideways I say because they completely ignored good solid concepts of Layers (which Blender had) and rather than replace with a better more proven system of layers, integrated it in a very clumsy way within Outliner.
A layer indication or display of some kind in Outliner would be an improvement over Maya for example. Because Maya layers and how it handles transforms and parenting can cause a great deal of confusion and actually it is a system that breaks real easy and you have to work extra hard to maintain. A layer display of some kind in Maya would help this. (I am not aware of any though I could be wrong)
But outside of an indication as to which layer something is in, Layers do no belong in Outliner. Granted, this is a display option. But with this option you are actively working with and managing layers in Outliner. I don’t think this is a good design.
But it is far better than only 20 layers with no way to name them (without an addon).
Hello
Andrew Hodgson from ILM is explaining Blenders hierarchy problem in greater detail in this video. He says it’s one of the main blocks as to why Blender is not being used for modellers in VFX studios.
You might be happy to know he uses Blender for his concept art so there is no bias here, it’s pure functionality of Blenders grouping set up.
Thank you for posting this. His talk about considering others in the pipeline and how they break models down was informative. After this, I am going to need to revaluate how i break down my models in the outlines.
Judging from the move to walk away from the VFx platform, it seems the Blender devs. have come to the idea of Blender becoming a key part of a new ecosystem that is completely FOSS (as opposed to letting ILM, Autodesk, Maxon, ect… set the standards and then just copy it).
For example, spending more time to improve I/O and relations with Godot and GIMP along with their teams rather than the companies behind Unity and Photoshop. Another example is the slow, but steady push to improve sculpting and painting so artists won’t have to purchase Zbrush for high resolution modeling. Then there’s Geometry Nodes to allow access to powerful procedural tools without Houdini.
Lack of groups can be annoying for some cases, but saying that you can’t do transformers in Blender without them is a bit of nonsense. It would be a bit more involved, but it would not be impossible.
The way I’d do “groups” for such a case would be to use empties, probably mostly boxes and spheres, then parent the children of groups under these helpers and make the meshes themselves not selectable. So it’d be sort of a rig, where you can’t really touch the geometry if you are an animation.
Scaling the helpers to encapsulate the groups they cover would be a bit of a pain, so yes, having true groups would be more useful, but it still doesn’t mean you can’t do such a type of work in Blender at all.
I am trying to figure out this.
Since I have not used other software, my only experience comes from Microsoft Office. Say for example in Power Point, if you select a few shapes together and group them together then it becomes one object (that is composite).
So this is what we are talking about?
I never could imagine to post a tutorial for Maya on BlenderArtists but here it goes, just to put things into perspective.
That is a little-bit like recommending to clean your kitchen with a toothbrush - sure you can do it, but would you want to?
And that is exactly the difference of working with groups/empty’s in other DCC’s and Blender. Others are like wish-mops or vacuum cleaners, you can do the work easily, while with Blender you have to go down on your knees and do cm for cm.
Clicks add up and if you have tons of groups the amount of work this creates is just… 
What takes me 0.5 seconds in Maya has the potential to add up to 5 minutes of work in Blender.
Its infuriating, stupid and 100% unnecessary, all the BF has to do is treat empty’s like collections and add some other small functionality and it is done.
Having collections without (optional) transforms is just stupid.
Having empty’s without the UI functionality of collections is just stupid.
The collection system is unfinished and in a half-done state, there are no proper concepts about how to work properly with empty’s since the BF does not recognize them as first class citizen and rather have you not use them for grouping and rigging, but they also don’t provide a functioning alternative.
This is known, but nobody seems to have a plan to change it for the better.
Rather it is swept under the carpet and some people pretend that there is no problem at all.
I agree that a separate “group” function similar to other software would be great. I can not imagine that it would be that difficult to implement as a separate function from collections.
I would just like to point out that if you select the empty and hit “shift g” there is a menu option to select its children, although it will deselect the empty so you may have to select it again depending on what you want to do.
Also if you select an object and hit “shift g” there is another option to select “siblings” that will select it’s “brothers and sisters”.
Maybe an add-on developer could use these options (coupled with an invisible empty) to simulate the “group” functionality. I would prefer it to be a built in feature though.
