Hi Peer, thanks very much for the feedback and clear descriptions.

I'm doubtful that deprecation of object names working as a simple group-like mechanism would be good. There is still value in having a simple "tags" like functionality that doesn't change in-viewport selection behavior like grouping does.

But compatibility is an even bigger issue. This part here:

> "Opening a v4 file with v5 would require that a name group be converted to
> a hierarchical group which is not a function that exists now."

That just doesn't seem viable since there would be a major change in selection behavior when working on those objects. I don't want to have a v4 file opened in v5 to have very different behavior than v4 when working inside the viewport.

There should be other possible solutions than deprecating name groups. One method that I had thought about doing previously is to pop up a menu when you clicked on a name label that could have entries for "Assign here" and "Rename". That also provides a natural expansion point for more stuff in the future. A right click on the name could work as a shortcut for directly assigning with no menu popping up.

Another possibility would be to have left click on the object name do inline renaming and introduce some kind of button for assignment like something to the left of the selection dot. I don't really like that very much though it will be hard to convey the meaning of the "assign" button visually and I've tried very hard to not have a lot of internal narrow columns inside the scene browser.

It would also be good for renaming to be easier to access, it's a bit awkward right now.


re:
> I think I’ll come to like clicking on a group name to add a selected item to that group.
> In Illustrator and Corel I often have problems dragging an item through a long list in
> the Layers Palette so that I can drop it on another item for the purpose of grouping.
> Click to group avoids that problem.

Yes I have been trying pretty hard to not use drag and drop which can be awkward in a few different ways. Not only with traversing a long list but also it can be tricky indicating whether you want something as a sibling to a current item or as a child to it.


re:
> In addition to the disappearing object problem that new users like me may stumble over, it
> creates an inconsistency when coexisting with groups: I can give 2 groups the same name,
> but that doesn’t cause them to combine.

Yes, this is a consequence of the desired behavior for copying a group which is that the original group and the new copy of the group should be independently addressable in the scene browser.

Earlier I had considered making a separate section in the scene browser for groups but I think it's worked out better to have object names and groups work together in the same section.


re:
> I can even give 2 objects the same name, but not have them be grouped if they are at
> different levels in the group hierarchy:

Yes, but I think that's desirable, basically once you place an item inside of a group that object becomes part of the group and it's appropriate that the controls for it are scoped within the group.

It's consistent in that object (other then groups) name grouping only happens to objects that are siblings within the same direct parent. They can be siblings because they're at the root and not in any group, or they can be siblings within the same direct parent group.


re:
> However, if I Ungroup the 2nd "foo" the 2 objects named "sphere" get combined into a
> name group, which might not be what I intended:

Yes, but if it's not what you wanted the other "sphere" object is not selected while the one you just ungrouped is so you can reassign or rename or whatever you need to do to get your desired end result right now.


re:
> Newly created objects that have not yet been renamed by the user could even get descriptive
> default names based on the operation that created them such as "Plane", "Loft", or "Name of Script".

This is something I've deliberately avoided - having auto generated names causes the scene browser list to become very large and it's hard to wade through them all to find the names that are significant to you that you've specifically assigned.

I'll experiment some with a pop up menu when clicking on a name label and see how that feels.

Thanks,
- Michael