Scene organization with Outliner Groups view

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Have anyone tried using Groups instead of layers with a project of medium complexity?

I just discovered Outliner “Groups” view and am just amazed of how useful is: it takes Blender Outliner almost at the same level of functionality of Photoshop layers.

I guess I’m writing this just to raise the attention on this awesome feature, because in recent months there was a lot of hype around the “drag-n-drop parenting” patch, but right now I don’t see it as revolutionary as it looked before, not after using Outliner Groups view.

I’d love to hear from more experienced blenderheads if they use it and, if not, why.
Cheers!

2

How is it, I have never heard of this?
From what you say, I am very interested to learn more about this!

Does anyone have any info on this?

3

If im right, here at 10:15:

Carozza, one mini feature for the ouliner with group view would be damn nice:
1. show also ungrouped objects in outliner group view…
2. drag and drop ungrouped objects into groups…

Lets ask Scuey for this, Carozza…

After this little feature i would be very satisfied with the outliner

4

Oh yes, those two features would make Blender Outliner simply PERFECT!
Scuuuey? Are you there, mate?

5

UFO, sorry for not replying before. To use this feature just set a panel to show the Outliner and set it to Group view.
Beware that it will be empty until you begin grouping objects together; Tungee’s feature request is on the right track here.

6

Carozza i talked with SCUEY via IRC. He had no time now, but he will look into this…

7

This is really good news!
I appreciate your support and if Scuey could find some time to look into this I think it would be a great improvement for those people used to Photoshop layers or Cinema4D object management.

Outliner Group view let us branch-select many objects in one click, hide them and so on and so forth. This baby deserves some love my friends!

8

Exactly, Carozza!
If Point 2 will be too complicated for Scuey, i would be very happy with only Point 1 too…

9

In the meantime a possible workaround is to create a group called “Others” or similar to host any object that doesn’t fit in other groups already present.

I hope somebody get interested in improving this aspect of Blender Outliner because I feel it’s very near to be perfect already.

Cheers! :slight_smile:

10

The most important question here is in which mode this should be implemented. The current Groups view displays the groups from all Scenes, but only those objects which are in groups. In most cases the fact that groups from multiple scenes are visible is a bit weird. I don’t think there are in many cases in which a user would want this. On the other hand, you have the sort of simple logic that a view called “Groups” should display all groups, regardless of scene. In my opinion, the Groups view should probably only display the groups in the active scene. The issue with displaying non-grouped objects in the Group view (in it’s current state) is that you would have all non-grouped objects from all scenes displayed together in a big mess. This would lead to a lot of confusion, because you would be adding various objects to groups via the outliner and it would not be clear which scene they are in.

A couple solutions:

  1. The Group view can remain at the scope of all scenes, but we just display the actual Scene tree nodes as we do for All Scenes mode. This amounts to the new Group mode becoming the current All Scenes mode + the current Group mode. (current, meaning the way we have it now.) So the question that asks itself is, would we simply like to add groups to the All Scenes mode (and Active Scene) and keep Group mode as is, or would we prefer to keep the All Scenes and Active Scene modes as they are and have a new Group mode which somehow works differently?

  2. We reduce the Group mode to be only a view of groups which are present in the ACTIVE scene. Other, non-grouped objects are visible as well. In other words, Group mode would now become a version of Active Scene mode with groups displayed as a priority (at the top). The only question here is, would we miss having groups displayed at the All Scenes scope?

To me, I think option two would be my personal choice, but this needs some thought. Could be other ideas and variations as well. The thing we want to avoid though is multiplying the number of outliner views that we offer. Better to keep these options simple.

That said, I think implementing drag and drop for adding objects to groups should be fairly straightforward. Adding an object to a group is done in the obvious way, as is moving an object from one group to another. The only uncertainty is how to remove an object from its group. The intuitive motion of pulling the object and dropping it off the tree has already been taken by the Clear Parent operator. An alternative would be to remove an object from its group simply by dropping it on the group node which it is already under. This is not the most intuitive, but it’s OK. The other alternative would be to disable DND (un)parenting operations in Group mode so that the Group Clear operation may use the action of dropping the object off the tree onto empty space. This last point, of course requires Option 2 from above.

Let me know your opinions.

11

Skuey, first off thank you very much for your interest on this topic; I didn’t hope for a complete relation like the one you posted and I agree with your points.

Well, if it was for me I’d go for the second option, too, combined with the “special” DND to un-group objects instead of un-parent them.

At present I’m happily using Groups view and I find it useful to the point that I’m considering flatting down all layers and manage the whole scene with just Outliner, but I’m still not sure if I’d miss something doing so.

Let’s wait for Tungee and others to express some valuable opinions on this topic.

Cheers!

12

A lot of care needs to be used here…

To the contrary, one of the most common uses for groups is for linking characters. The largest value (I daresay the primary value) in the Groups view of the Outliner is its utility for managing these linked groups. When you link a group, it’s not bound to any particular scene. In fact, AFAIK, the scene struct doesn’t even have a direct means of listing the groups used in that scene. Remember also, that like layers, objects can belong to multiple groups… so group identity(ies) is(are) attributes of objects; it’s not the other way around.

Long story short: yes groups can be used to organize your scenes and you can certainly use the Groups view of the Outliner to visualize that… but I wouldn’t recommend doing so at the expense of those group features that are currently (and perhaps more commonly) in use.

13

Hey SCUEY.

I am not very experienced with Blender so , I admit, my statements and ideas may be fundamentally flawed, but I have some ideas to, at least, consider.

If you think about it, the Scene tree nodes are actually applicable to almost all the different display modes in the outliner - except maybe Libraries, Data Blocks, User Preferences, and Key Maps. And I wouldn’t doubt that with a little( or maybe a lot) of thought the Scene tree nodes may somehow even be applicable to them(either now or in the future), though I really haven’t thought about how…

And because it’s applicable to almost all the different “display modes”, it, perhaps, should be handled as such. It, therefore, seems like it - may - be desirable to remove the “ALL Scenes” mode from the “Display Mode” drop down, and either have it as an auxiliary button within the header or maybe as an option within the View menu. So, in other words, this “All Scenes” option could be applied to (almost)all the display modes.

And, to be honest with ya’, the Display Modes: Visible Layers, Selected, Active, Same Types, and Groups; are actually subsets of the (Current/All) Scene(s) mode, and - could, ideally, be subsets of the Sequence mode(e.g. meta strips could be treated as groups, etc…). It kind of seems as though “these” display modes would make more sense as a complement or qualifier to the remaining “Current Scene” and “Sequence” Display Modes, and maybe, somehow, even to the others. And - as a complement or qualifier, it may be desirable to place them within an auxiliary drop down menu next to the Display Modes menu. This would reduce the display modes to just 6 types.

Just some thoughts, good day to you!

NOTE: I tend to edit my post, so this post may change.:stuck_out_tongue:

14

@Fweeb:
Right, you bring up some very good points. I hadn’t actually looked into it yet, but yes, it crossed my mind that groups might not be linked to scenes at all. In this case, the only solutions I can think of are a bit weird. It would mean adding group display to both Active Scene and All Scene mode. And in Active scene mode you simply don’t display those objects in a group which are not part of the scene. This is fine, but then you still have Group mode. Would this be useful by itself? Or not anymore? I use groups myself on occasion, but not enough to have encountered all the use cases.

Perhaps it’s also useful to discuss the pros and cons of organizing with groups versus empties. There are many obvious ones, but one disadvantage to group organization that crossed my mind is that they cannot be nested. This is something I use frequently with empties. So I guess in my experience I would be pretty happy with just empties as I use them now, and groups when you need them for special uses. The more I think about this, the more I wonder if any of this would be really useful. In terms of simply organizing things, I definitely focus on empties and then only use groups when they serve a specific purpose.

And then, if you don’t have non-grouped objects displayed alongside groups, then drag and drop functionality is pretty limited in its usefulness.

15

Well, there is one BIG feature that Groups view have and Scene view don’t: the ability to enable/disable:

  • visibility
  • selection
  • rendering
    of an entire branch with a single click on the group name’s icons.

If this feature was implemented in the standard Outliner Scene view I wouldn’t mind Groups view anymore, because I find nested branches very useful, too.

16

For arch visualizers like us, we dont need to to put one object in several groups…
So im with Carozza;
showing the non-grouped objects in the grouped outliner view would be really sufficient…

The drag and drop grouping feature could be here an extra option.

17

@Carrozza:
I realize how handy this is.

It’s for this very reason that I might consider an alternative to changing group display. The idea would be to simply write an operator which would select the subtree of an object (e.g. an empty used for organization). So, imagine a “Select Subtree” or “Select Hierarchy” operator which you would execute with a context menu entry or a keyboard shortcut. Then you can toggle renderability, selectability, and visibility with (r,s,v). You can already do this of course if you independently select all these objects, but, as you are aware, sometimes you have hundreds.

This is basically the default functionality that we have now for groups in Group View. Since you would not want it to be the default for just any object, I would propose a shortcut.

18

This operator already exists (at least in the 3D View)… bpy.ops.object.select_grouped()… it’s currently bound to Shift+G->Children

19

Looking at the numerous layer related add-ons being developed I gather scene management is still an issue in Blender, so thought to bring up this old thread to see if anyone could come up with further development.
I still think Blender Group view is near there and actually use it a lot, there are just some minor tweaks to be added and we could be happy with it.

20

WOW!!! Nice Post!Kind Regards
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