NO! Object Grouping Please

the story in short: improve minor issues, so grouping was not really needed. I know more or less how to select, but try to select multiple! collection's content in outliner, or parent/child combinations in 3D (more than one), which is key organising thousands of objects within hundrets of collections. And yes of course instancing collections is nice technique !

1. Don't know how to fix this
2. Know them of course, but my idea is rather different as stated in the subject.

Maybe my idea is somehow misunderstood: I don't want groups! why: Groups get nested, groups need to be opened before being editable, they need to be closed again (or get lost when opened), they add up a new class of objects, groups easily become a nightmare if someone in the team uses them excessively, on large scenes they add up extra problems (at least my experience with 3dsmax), they conflict the concept of the Collections which are half way groups anyhow, and can get complex enough easily... So I think parenting is not a poor man's grouping it is rather more effective in most use cases i can imagine (in case selection would work)

Ok. Now I can tell you my experience.

I have 6+ years experience of working on archviz project for UE. Selling apartments in Sweden with preview in UE based product. Here example , not the best CG product from visual side, but, believe me, sometimes titanic ton of modeling work. Modeling of complex houses exterior/interior with hundreds if not thouzands of diffeernt instances (different windows, doors, etc.) + everything around houses + it all based on dwg/pdf drawings. I know what "complex scene" mean...

I was working in 3D Max around 3 years and was using groups all that time. Then around 3 years I was working in Blender so I used parenting instead of groups.

Group locking allow to select/maniptlate them as single object in viewport what makes managing complex scenes much easier. Group locking prevent accidental f**ups like moving/deleting some object without noticing this. If you move/delete group of some 763 instances of window sills - you will see it 100%, no doubt.

With parenting accidentally moved/deleted objects waw common case. Selection with parenting was always through outliner - looking for exact Empty parent you need when you have dozens of such not work...

What I can say to you - groups is one of the best option for organizing such complicated work, IMO of course.

I See, it's a kind "not so easy to organise" project. Did you also do the communication with the architects? All different kind of drawings? And modelling was done in blender? no 3d from the client? Puh my deepest sympathy !

But still I would collapse/join as much as I can as early as possible. Also keeping window frames as instances mostly has no big benefit (once done). We do those frames mostly with inset/extrude all together not one by one. Also doing the ground with as one object is easier in many times.

We learned a lot from other disciplines (we were 95 % architects) to do things more effective: gaming-style vs CAD stye.

and btw. in 3dsmax we had a script collapsing all groups before starting rendering an animation ;-)

UE is not rendering, real time render mean optimizations. Instancing/LODing for repetable object part of such optimization. Keeping repetables like windows also good for fixes/changes eg. make all those windows 5cm wider.

Colapsing and joining is not a good way of working, you have 763 instance of windows, that is like 1 windows and 763 empty objects (in terme of geometry)

Grouping would allow quick select like CTRL+G in ue4 (never used 3DS max, only blender for more than 5 years, and the CTRL+G collection isn't great, you still have many object selectable, that can sometime overlap each other making hard to select the one you wish.

Another crutch instead of real functionality. As I see on video group selecting works via selecting empty - this is not what people request for. Groups is when objects in locked group act as single object... selecting any one will select whole group.

No, It works with shift double click. You can customize the emplty to be 0.1 pixels, and you wont even see it. When you click Shift + Double Click on an object that is part of the group, it selects the whole group. I believe machine is showing it this way for better visual comprehension.

And as well you can duplicate groups with Shift + D, or make a group within a group. Proper stuff. It feels like in Maya. You can change the pivot of the group, do whatever you like. Give it a try, because it is better than wait tor the team to implement is as you imagine. Since Blender is heavily community driven, you should try different solution, until you make Blender truly yours. Good luck. :)

Ok, now look.

1. It work via Shift+Doble Click . Why? Because this is addon sortcut and the way addon iniciate custom operator to check if object belong to group > select all belonging to group objects. But I do not want it to work such way. I want it to work same as other objects selection, just LMB . I do not want to waste 3.5 $ to check if it will work well with just LMB , I gess it will not.
2. Issue of most of those sophisticated "100 in 1" addons (MeshMachine, BoxCuttet) - they bring ton of funcrionality. OK!! Waht if I don't need/want all that stuff. What if I need only this single feature from it, there is no option to trhow away 99% of it to get this single feature.
3. Same with such addons keymaps designed to not interfer with default keymaps or replace ("enhance") them. My keymaps customized based on my long experience way to far from defaults. Lot of defaults just erased and replaced with my customs, lot of key combinations not used by default now occupied by my customs. I don't want to install that thing and then waste whole day solving keymap overlaps.

It's zero dollars, man. You seem really frustrated. I was trying to offer a workaround for now. Cheers!

And, about your second point. Machin3Tools is just brilliant. Everybody has different workflow, but this set of tools is brilliant as they are. You can select which parts of the addon you need, the other features you can disable. My point is, since this request from many of us doesn't get any traction for almost a year in requests in twitter/here/devtalk, etc., it's better to search for workarounds. Before using machin3 tools, I was using Group X, where the workflow is way different. That's all.

Hmm, really... it all gumroad, showing me 3.5$ in "Name a fair price" field, didn't noticed "standard edition" for 0$. Even so, 0$ price do not exclude other issues I described.

Then as you see this dude named topic NO! Object Grouping Please while he actually do not want groups because parenting is better...

If you want a group workflow, you can take a look at this as well: m-soluyanov.gumroad.com/l/qinstance

What Blender needs to understand is that this grouping system is pivotal in VFX industry pipelines, and it will never be taken remotely seriously until they adopt this industry standard ctrl+G method. Collections, although they have many unique features that make them great, will never be a replacement for Maya grouping heirachy. Blender trumps Maya in so many ways but it can't get the one thing right that it needs to compete at a professional level. Please Blender Foundation just adopt the standard.

Here's a Maya MEL script to convert the Blender style empty/locator/null groups into Maya native transform 'groups' I find this works great with the Machin3Tools grouping addon, allows me to work like Maya in Blender then export that to maya to pass down the pipeline.

proc deleteLocatorShapes() { string $sel[] = ls -sl ; string $obj = $sel[0]; string $children[] = listRelatives -ad $obj ; for($c in $children){ $t = objectType -isType "locator" $c ; print($t); if($t){ delete($c); } } }

deleteLocatorShapes();

I'll add one more thing. If someone wanted to be fancy, it could even be a modifier.

Create a Box, add the "Group" Modifier to it. Then in the modifier UI add to a list of what it's children should be. Could have a UI element reminiscent of Vertex Groups, a list with +/- to the right.

The modifier would then be the "parent" to everything in that box. Render the box as a wireframe, and hide it from render.