Just a few questions of a Maya user on how to deal with the outliner:
Is there a way to do actions like parenting and un-parenting directly within the outliner?
Is there a way to ignore if an object is hidden or on another layer and just do the stuff I want it to do anyway? (E.g. parenting or duplicating)
Is there a way to toggle visibility / selectability for a whole hierarchy?
4.1) Is my approach to substitute working with groups (as in Maya) with Empties reasonable?
4.2) If using blender groups is more appreciated, has a blender group a physical location so I can transform it?
4.3) Can I view both groups and scene objects at the same time in the outliner?
I’m not the best qualified to answer this, but here are a few thoughts:
I don’t believe ctrl+p works in the outliner, but you can press the space bar and type in parent, choose the menu item, and it works (choose the children and then the parent last, as you would in the 3D window).
I don’t understand the question, sorry…
If you’re not using layers to hide objects, then putting them in groups works nicely for me. You can toggle renderability, selectability, and visibility for the group name and everything in the group is altered. One option for hiding objects in a parenting hierarchy is to choose the parent and press shift+G and that will let you select all the children in that hierarchy. Then you can use hotkeys to limit renderability, visibility, etc. I think groups gives you more control, as items can be a part of more than one group, so you can make more subtle adjustments.
4.1. Empties are good for moving lots of objects around, scaling entire scenes, that sort of thing. I’m not exactly sure what you’re doing with the groups in Maya…
4.2. When you click on a group name, everything in the group is selected, and you can move it around. But it wouldn’t be quite the same as moving an empty that is acting as the parent. In a group (as I understand it) things move around as if each one had been selected individually. (They move as a group, but each has new transform/rotation/scale properties. With a parent, only the parent gets new transform/rotation/scale and everything else simply exists in relation to the parent.)
4.3. Personally, I like to use 3 different outliners when I’m working with a lot of objects: one for the “Current Scene” which lists everything, one for “Groups” which allows me to quickly toggle the visibility and renderability of stuff, and another for “Same Types” which is surprisingly handy.
No no, that was actually quite insightful! Gotta try the 3 outliner method and the spacebar trick! Not too sure how to go about groups though… I ll need to work more in Blender to get a good workflow going I suppose.
About 2)
Try selecting a object in the outliner that is actually on a different layer or invisible and then perform a duplication on this object. The object won’t duplicate. This results in random errors when duplicating large hierarchies since, w/o a warning the rest is duplicated just fine…
I have been wating for drag & drop parenting in the outliner for ages, as we can see it is common and expected by converting users (it was one of the first things to look for when i came onboard). It would really help for rigging tasks too. Also having a hotkey (maybe f) to frame the current selected bone (not only object, bone )
And - grouping works only for objects too. No way to group bones here (bone groups are exclusive, so each bone can be only in one group. That is not what i need, and i think came only for the reason of having a way to apply colors to bones )
Yeah drag and drop would be sweet! Any idea about the invisibility stuff I wrote? The one tagged with a 2)
About framing the bone, just hit “.” on your numpad in pose or edit mode, that works fine
Idk, I kinda like Blender’s approach to rigging, even without the “maya free hierarchy” style. What I haven’t completely figured yet though is how to apply transforms but keep the origin where it is. So that the current origin position is in local space at 0,0,0 but seems to always have to be in parent space. And what does “apply visual transforms” do?
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