Hello everybody and welcome to this lecture on using groups now using groups a great organization and
it's also great for moving multiple items from one blend file to another.
So just to highlight the issue that we have at the moment when we've created our chess scene so we go
ahead and go file an append in a blank and brand new blender file and then go all I've already been
here so let's just skip back to what you'd see you go to your project folder.
We'd go to in this case the low poly chess set and I've got two files there that I could pick from to
kind of pick one of them and you're presented with a series of options a series of folders here so we
can import materials we can import meche objects or mesh data in a mesh objects.
So I mean what happens if we go and grab the white pieces do all of the white pieces that are associated
with that come across.
No.
No they do not.
So this is one of these places where like well I dont really want to drag each individual one across
and I dont want to save as with the chessboard and try and move things about and it just basically gets
very complicated and very confusing if youre not careful.
So if we go ahead now and open up our chess scene and here we go weve got a lovely chess scene here
what we can go ahead and do and I can do this really quickly because Ive already group them in the hierarchy
and Im going to make sure before I selected him we got the black pieces the chessboard the white pieces.
Okay.
So I think all of the mesh objects I care about are under the empty board and pieces which allows me
to move in a chessboard around.
And what I can then do is hold down control as I click that and it will select everything thats underneath
that hierarchy which is incredibly useful.
The next thing I want to do is create a group out of this.
I'm just going to call it chessboard when I get there but I can go down to the object menu and then
we have a group and then create a new group and you can even later on add a selected item to the active
group so lets go ahead and add create in this case a new group.
And youll notice everything has this green outline.
Now in the lower left before I do anything else I dont want to click away.
There is an operator panel down there.
Its just gotten really small.
The name of this group Well lets name it chess board and let's see what happens then when we go ahead
and try to append.
Obviously remember to save your work first then new file and then lets go ahead and append.
And again it remembers where we were before and now if we have a look were in the chess scene blend
but now we have this group folder which means we can go and grab the chess board and append it from
library and there we go we've got the full chessboard ready to rock and roll straight away without having
to worry about anything else.
How awesome is that.
You've immediately been able to now bring everything that you've constructed in another scene all into
one place and this is great that enables you to make a model.
In this case a chess board in isolation and then bring it all in.
Everything across in one fell swoop rather than having to worry about everything else but also even
better than that grouping remains president.
After you've moved it in so you can still organise a new scene really well.
Okay so the next question of course is how do we manage this group.
How do we go ahead and say well all of these need to be.
How do I select everything in that group is one question because obviously grouping is an organizational
thing.
Now what do I do.
Well you can see that when things are a group they've got this green outline which helps you understand
let's say we want to move this and say this is a stand for our chess set.
There we go.
And we want to add that to this group as well that's part of this current scene and we want it part
of this group over here.
Well in order to do that and in order to start managing some groups now we've appended this into a new
scene.
If you go to the object properties tab which is a little orange cube and then we can go down and two
we find groups and we can add it to a group and there's already a group that exists chessboard.
And now we can add it to that chessboard group so that's great.
We've now got everything in this group on there but how do I go ahead and select everything that is
grouped.
Well if we hold down Shift and Angier brings up a very big list and you can see all of the different
groups that can exist and this is one of the reasons why there's just not a simple way of accessing
these groups straightaway.
So we wanted to say what is this part of shift in a select group.
What part of a group is it.
We can also select things that are all on the same layer select things that all of the same type all
have the same pair and all have the same colour et cetera et cetera.
There's many you can pick from at this point.
We want the group and then it will select everything else in this group.
And that's incredibly useful because now we can go ahead and move it in this case and and lift up ever
so slightly says off of the ground.
And there we go we're starting to build up a scene now and that works with any of the objects that are
in this groups of us to go ahead and select the queen gear shift in G and go to group.
It will select everything in that group once more.
Another way of grouping things together as we have a look in the object group menu we can see we can
create a new group control energy.
So what we can do there is we can make sure that we select everything that has the same material on
it and we can do that by holding down shift and the L key at the same time and then we can select linked
objects.
And so I want everything that sharing the same material.
They're now all there now.
I can go ahead and go control genes that will add a group.
So these black pieces are part of the chessboard group we can see that or I can use this button here
but only use control and G is added in a new group and I can call that new group straightaway what shall
we call it.
Let's think black pieces will probably be the best.
And there we go we created a new group.
You can also from this menu go down let's say to a chessboard go get to the drop down on the far right
and select the group.
And there we go we've selected everything.
Now from there.
So we you your objects themselves can be parts of more than one group.
It's important for starting to manage your groupings.
So finally where is that big list of groups.
Because as a scene gets more complex you can't be expected to click on an individual object.
Go shift in genes and select everything in the group.
You might not even Which group that's a good question because at the moment if we select something in
the blank a shift in G group it does give us an option which is useful but it's still quite owner is
doing that.
How do I know how many groups I've got in my scene how do I know what the active group is.
Well that's all done in the outline.
So once again I'll make this a little bigger over here bring this down and where we've got an option
at the very top on the head bar where we have all scenes we can change that to a different selection
groups in this case.
And then we go lot black pieces and chess board.
And this is where you can start adding things to groups as well.
If you wanted to.
Now you can see here we've only got two groups in the scene that's accurate and we can make sure that
exists as well if we go into a new blend file and go to append bring in the chess board that we've been
working on all know I've saved is a different file amended groups that was the file we just working
on we got group we got black pieces we can just bring in the individual black pieces and there we go
there.
In our scene ready to use.
And if we go to the all scenes under the outline and go to groups we can see that the black pieces group
is there as well.
And you can turn off the settings for visibility selecting and rendering any of the objects that are
part of that group as well which is incredibly useful.
It just allows you that extra level of control.
And of course under the outliner there are a series of other options you can go for as where you can
just do whatever you've got selected.
So if we go ahead and select the porn only the porn appears etc etc. There's lots you can do in this
outline as well.
So there we go there's an overview of using groups.
Now they are incredibly useful.
Use them where it's appropriate especially if you're moving vast numbers of models like on the chessboard
here over to a new scene to set it up in that new scene groups will be an absolute saviour for you to
be able to do that nice and quickly.
K. That's it for this lecture.
I hope you've enjoyed it and found it informative and I'll see you all in the next lecture.