What is the diffrence between futur Goup function and an actual Selection multiple named of objects named?

Hi Pilou, well all the details have yet to be determined, but likely one big difference will be that Groups will allow for a hierarchy, like names that are a child of other names and can be expanded or collapsed.

So the idea there is that it will be easier to manage a linked set of names with Groups since you will be able to go to the parent item in the scene browser and use the various controls (hide/lock/select) to work on all those items at once.

- Michael

Aha, great news. Some hierarchy would come in very handy.

Any strategy yet for exporting groups and objects towards layers, materials, groups?
I think you've got guts (and impressive brains) to come up with a new organising system while almost all the other programs use layers and groups. But that makes the export quite a challenge I guess.. Would really come in handy if Styles would easily transfer to the material setup (since you have the different colours on screen). Now in LWO and OBJ export styles get lost if i'm correct, while objects translate to groups. So how about groups?

Hi pitrak,

> Would really come in handy if Styles would easily transfer to
> the material setup (since you have the different colours on screen).

Yup, that's actually how it works right now, it's been set up to do that since the Jun-23-2009 v2 beta release.

One of the main reasons to have styles was to enable it to work like this, with style assignments being translated into material assignments. That's currently handled for LWO and OBJ export formats.


> Now in LWO and OBJ export styles get lost if i'm correct, while
> objects translate to groups.

No, actually styles are fully exported to LWO and OBJ formats - the style assignments become material assignments in the generated polygon output.

Probably group information will not be exported anywhere though (except possibly through STEP format), because many formats just do not have any mechanism to have multi-level hierarchies in them. For example neither LWO nor OBJ have any mechanism provided in the file structure for that. So groups will probably be just for organizing stuff while working within MoI.

But styles to materials are all going 100% for LWO and OBJ formats right now, and styles are also translated to layers for 3DM files, and the similar "levels" for IGES files, and also are applied as object colors for SAT, IGES, and STEP output.

- Michael

Assuming it will work like Rhino, alinging a group is the thing I most look forward to... like text, or an assembly or parts.

Hi Nick, could you describe some more about what you mean by "aligning a group" ?

- Michael

> Hi Nick, could you describe some more about what you mean by "aligning a group" ?

I think I just found out what he means. Had to move different objects (all in one style) up to match the Z-level of another part. So tried to do it with align, but that collapsed all the objects in my selection to the same Z position rather than maintaining their relative positions.

Hi Michael,

I will check for lw tomorrow, but actually hierarchy is saved in .lwo when using modo.

Hi PaQ, actually it looks like I spoke too soon about LWO, yes there does seem to be a way to indicate the parent of a mesh layer in LWO so that may be a possibility to leverage for translation of groups, although I'm not sure if I would be able to get to that right away.

There is another complication that I want to allow for objects to possibly belong to more than one group in MoI, and that type of structure doesn't look like it would fit. But if you just avoided that kind of a thing it might work.

For OBJ format, I just did a double check to make sure, and there does not seem to be any method available there for hierarchy though.

- Michael

>>>>I think I just found out what he means. Had to move different objects (all in one style) up to match the Z-level of another part. So tried to do it with align, but that collapsed all the objects in my selection to the same Z position rather than maintaining their relative positions.>>>>

Ths would be done with the MOVE command. Align will put all the selected objects "aligned" with a point.

Start:



Align vertical center with group (on x 0):



Align vertical center without group (on x 0):

Hi Nick, yeah I think it will be possible to make it behave like that although it may depend on if you turn on something like "Select as one unit" which may be an option on the group (still not 100% figured out yet though).

Is that the only command that you'd expect to get different behavior with groups?

The other transforms will already treat a selected set of objects as a kind of rigid group, so probably that is the only one that would need some tuning up unless I have forgotten something.

- Michael

Actually, I do know that that isnt exactly how Rhinos align works (using bounding box of selected objects), but what I meant, as shown in the pic above, is that the selected group would align in the way that MoI's alignment tool works (which is just flippin awesome ;-) ). Sorry for the confusion, if any.

Hi Nick, no confusion here, I get what you mean.

But can you thnk of any other commands similar to that, which would seem to need a tune-up in behavior to work well with groups?

- Michael

>can you thnk of any other commands similar to that..

Personally, nothing comes to mind. Thanks.

How about scale?

Actually, pretty much all of them.

Mirror = Mirror entire group to one group, or mirror all individual obects within the group.

Move = as individuals or all.

Rotate = etc, etc

Etc.

Hi Burr,

> How about scale?

Well, scale applies the same scale factor around the same origin point to all the selected objects.

So for example, take 3 individual boxes that overlap each other.

Select them all and run scale, notice how they all scale in the same way, the same as if they were connected?

If you now boolean union those things together into one single object and then do a scale on just that single object, you'll get the same kind of scaled result.

Most of the transforms are like this, they perform the same transformation to all the selected objects so they all stay in their same relative positions... The same with Move, Copy, Rotate, Mirror.... Align is the only one that does not maintain relative positions so far.

- Michael

A great rotate tool. Utilizing MoI's awsome point picking functions, You could select a group, then have a second command part that asked to use say a "3 point picking method" to select the individual faces that would be included as the target reference of the rotate, then move to the rotation pick points and/or axis part of the command, then individually, the selected objects react from their respective selected 3 point picks and rotate, per scale, to the desired point. A great scene managment tool for designing a certain set to face to a particular location.

Yes I understand. But the option to have it react differently. ie; If they were actually being scaled as a single object but all at the same time. So put a few boxes near each other, then scale them and they would grow "Through" each other. A different kind of scale.

Same diff with all the others was what I was refering to. I guess it's a bit different than what was being discussed. I had already misunderstood Nick's question! :O