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.

Hi Mike, yeah I want the grouping mechanism to enable a hierarchical structure so you could have parent and child groups.

I think that an instance mechanism will be another separate mechanism yet from groups, since it needs a fair amount of specific tools for it such as having a way to swap out the base definition and have all the instances update. Also an instancing mechanism is maybe more related to a type of library or catalog of stuff in some ways, while a "group" will probably be more of an structural organization tool... That's at least some of my current thinking anyway.

It would be nice though if object names, groups, and instances could maybe be more parts of one single system instead of 3 different types of things, but I'm not entirely sure yet if trying to combine them too much might make things more complex instead of better.

- Michael

<<Michael:
I want the grouping mechanism to enable a hierarchical structure so you could have parent and child groups.>>

This will help Moi to be more quick and easy to use...i mean:on a hand we got the best UI,quick and powerful tools;on the other we have a basic grouping mechanism that often deboost workflow.
(you see,Michael, users that post models more complicated are growing,lot of sub-objects,details etc...)

Hi Mauro, yup I definitely want to boost the organization capabilities.

But also I want to do it carefully too, once systems like that are put in place it's very difficult to go back and change them so I've wanted to be pretty sure about the path to take before jumping in.

I've seen many organization systems that can end up being quite inflexible and can cause a lot of problems with side effects from how they work, so that has made me be fairly cautious about the whole general area.

So far the initial steps of being able to have 3 different methods of organization (by object name, by types, and by styles) has turned out well as a starting point I think, especially since they are able to interact with one another instead of only one system taking total precedence. So at least so far it's nice and flexible and I want to try and preserve that going forward too.

One of the main things missing currently is hierarchy though, and I definitely want to incorporate something for that.

- Michael

A little big headache :)

<<Michael:
But also I want to do it carefully too, once systems like that are put in place it's very difficult to go back and change them so I've wanted to be pretty sure about the path to take before jumping in.>>


I think all we know your approach and "philosophy" about Moi's programming,take time you need..we'll be here to support your work !