Group objects into a subassembly?

 From:  Mike K4ICY (MAJIKMIKE)
5231.4 
Good timing Ed,

Michael, I was building a model tonight that actually has a lot of little parts that form some kind of a wheel.
I had to do a lot of intricate selecting so that I could do a rotate by axis to move parts of the cluster in place.
I was able to use the naming ability to help organize the large number of objects, but in the bargain, I lost naming on smaller objects I did not want to loose right yet.

Groups with sub-group ability would be very nice.

My suggestion for the list organization would be to allow for both 'selection by object name', 'by material' and 'by group'

The groups and sub-objects or groups would be shown as distributed by hierarchy.
Maybe an A-B toggle switch could alternate the list from 'groups as arranged' to 'all objects as named'

Selecting objects under the named expansion would select all same named objects regardless of group affiliation.
Selecting objects while in 'group list' mode would only allow for selection of same named objects within that group.

You'll know better though, I'm sure there is an easy and logical method.


One big problem I had tonight is of interest here: There is a file that is now so large, I'll have to bring it to work because it makes my home PC go into eternal crunch death, and I had to reboot to bring it the sweet mercy of death is was so entitled.

- When I went to Mirror/copy a large group of objects, the files size grew accordingly and it became too much.

Would it be possible to consider some group copies to be 'instances' or 'clones'. It would not save the video card processor, but it would keep the size down, and on-screen video render polys could be reproduced instantly to cut down on processor time. Ungrouping a clone group would of course make it a set of individual objects as it is now.

Just some thoughts.