Ok, now I get it… What “scared” me was grouping. In the “old days” all you needed to do is CTRL-G and you have a group. After trying that, I couldn’t find the group at first. It groups and all, but now becomes a fake user, not tied to the collection. It lists in the “orphan” data view. So, this ctrl-g is now not needed.
My work flow is for animation. So, to build a very fast scene, I would use blocking style objects in separate asset files and link them into the main scene. This allows me to build the animation and camera stuff first then I can go back and do the actual models. Meaning a cube and two planes for the roof of a house. A cylinder and a cone for a tree etc… each of these in their own blend files…
This collection system works great for this because I don’t have to worry about adding to the groups, they go there anyways. All I have to do is link the proper collection… and I can edit the assets and see the finished results in the main animation… very cool.
I quite like the idea of these new collections, but it’s true that it’d be very handy to be able to manipulate a collection of objects as one entity in the viewport.
Someone in the thread you linked to had an idea of a possibility to “seal” a collection, which would make it behave as one object in the viewport. “Unsealing” it would turn it back into a regular collection. You could have different shortcuts for making sealed and unsealed collections (and a checkbox in the redo panel + option for that in the outliner also)
Taking that idea further: you could select a sealed collection and go to edit mode, which would automatically enter a local view with the objects inside the collection, for quick edits to individual objects. Out from local mode -> a single entity again.
Here I am. My idea was a cheap compromise: the “seal” feature would only cover selection purposes.
It may be something like: click on an object which is part of a sealed collection would select all objects (the one cliclked being the active object) in the collection, doubleclick would only select that very object. This could work the other way around extending to unsealed collections: click on an object selects it, doubleclick would select all its collection friends *. (Big warning: be aware that there’s something ambiguous that I didn’t think of: an object can be in multiple collections! So what if your Cube is in a sealed collection AND in a non-sealed one? Single click what would do? And if it was in two sealed collections? What collection would be selected? Should a pop-up appear giving you the possible choices?)
A deeper implementation could be: sealed objects are “meta-objects” that have they’re own origin point (a choosable object?), and can have modifiers/constraints applied to, i.e. each object in the collection inherits the (overridable) modifiers/constraints. There are probably many drawbacks in this idea, so I just sponsor the cheaper one.
*Re-reading this I’m thinking that maybe just having double-click on an object to select an entire collection would be enough, so making redundant having a Seal feature?
Oh well maybe not, since we can have nested collections (3 clicks in a row? 4? 5? 6?? Ayeeee)
That’s a no-brainer - select the objects of a sealed one, together with the clicked object
The big problem is - what if both collections have the ‘seal’ mark? Well i suppose - select both.
However i have a feeling that the ability of an object to be in different collections / layers is a design flaw to start with. Some basic simple rules have to exist. And the flexibility will not be lost. I have been working with one layer / group per object for a long time.
And i couldn’t agree with a double click to select a group. A single click, yes - make things as natural as possible. It’s a one object behaviour now. Double click to enter a group - probably - fewer times we do that.
Sorry both solution would be bad, and introduce issues:
How could I select just a single object that is also in a sealed collection? Click on it and then? How could I deselect only the collection and keep that object selected? Should I unseal a collection everytime i want to select just an object inside it?
What if I want to select only 1 collection? Why both? And in case how to unselect the unwanted one?
Selectiong both in this paradigm should be done putting both the collections inside a container sealed collection
I’d prefer as it is in 2.7x: a good old popup listing all the choices (Cube, CollectionA, CollectionB…). It would be in the way sure, but only in case of clicking on an object inside one or more sealed collection
