This is genius. As a Maya user for over a solid decade at WORK, I can relate as well. This is a good solution. I’ve used Lightwave, XSI, Houdini, 3DSMax, and Blender in production on billion dollar projects and can say you won’t find me participating in flame wars because it’s pointless. Software is a tool. Use what’s there and best for the job and team you’re on. Finish the show, go home, drink beer, live a bit, pet cats, play with your kids, sleep, wake up, repeat. Flame war... gets in the way of one of those things. Listen to Bob, even if you’re frozen on Hoth and just need time inside a tauntaun. If not, it’s Alderaan for you.
I just find you are really nice and your video is so useful, i have been struggling for the grouping problem for a while and I can't find anything useful to solve my problem, but with your video and the the super kicking ass addon, I just fell in love with blender again! thank you!
Outliner has another mode called "Scene" - this was default in pre 2.8 and is more like traditional outliner and parenting works as expected by simple drag and drop + there is no confusion with Collections mixed in if you don't need them (in early stages of project).
@@rous3369 Maya uses the middle mouse to parent or for reordring so there is no accidental parenting. left click is only for selection and it's super intuitve since there is not box selction conflicting with move to collection .
Hi Blender Bob. The topic of this video hits exactly the experience we are having at the studio! But you, as a blender veteran adopting the Machin3 tool group functionality does make me think that some of that could help the Blender user experience. Like being able to simply copy or delete a hierarchy, or simply dragging a whole hierarchy in the outliner. Anyway, thanks for the video.
i think collection is not only for rendering, for example, collection instance is a great way to duplicate objects. Great lesson from you again, cheers!
Groups are standard UX even Open Office has Groups. The biggest difference between Groups and Collections is a Group is actual set of Objects vs a Collection that is a "tagged" set of Objects. With blenders new MultiObject support it would now make sense implementing Groups ( Could be possible to apply a Modifier to a Group etc., especially since there are no linked Modifiers ) . Collections work fine for Rendering but for Scene organization and as a helper for Modelling, Groups are needed.
Dude, did you actually watch the video - blender already has everything you would want from groups.. it's just not called "Groups" ?! 100% the same functionality as in Maya or Cinema4D (Except you can't add modifiers to hierarchies in Blender yet.. but not in maya either.)
@@augm3nt384 but grouping is nothing more than hierarchical parenting. The same in Maya, C4d and Blender. All funcionality is there already without addons ( they are nothing more than shortcuts ). What do you exactly expect from grouping that is not in Blender?
@@augm3nt384 I get the point you're making but one of Blender's core selling points / strengths is the community providing tools and solutions that the base software is missing or would benefit from. To say that what is missing is an officially stamped, native Blender solution for providing a properly labeled Group function is correct--but to overlook the totally useable solution that a community member developed is sort of unnecessarily dying on a hill that need not exist.
I had a project where I had to copy a parented object and whenever I was selecting the parent it wasn't selecting the children with it and I had to do it manually. also now I know the deference between parenting and grouping. Thanks Blender Bob.
Shift + G in viewport shows hierarchy selection menu - quickly select children, siblings etc. from there. Also in Outliner right click menu has "Select hierarchy" - just map it to keyboard shortcut (i.e. Middle mouse) to quickly select whole hierarchy with one click!
Machin3 is the Man... Tons of reasons why. The original Star Wars, 1977, is the best. Push ups don't bother me. I do tons of them all the time. Now if you want to punish someone, make them run. That's hell.
Parenting, Collections, Collection Instancing. Blender have tools, Blender is powerful, Blender is just different. Maya users don't want to learn, they just want Blender to be 'Maya Free'
Very useful information. If you look at the outliner Filter>Restriction toggles, there are restrictions that make collections helpful with things other than rendering also, like selecting, hiding, and isolating in the viewport.
Maya still has the best grouping system with a very intuitive outliner that I have seen in any other DCC , Blender's one is so messy and confusing to me.
Actually I like the ability in Blender to turn objects or groups on-off from the outliner and the holdout too. When I go back to Maya I miss that. But yeah, grouping in Maya... it just works. I make that clip to help people but in the end only a few thousand people will see it.
btw, Empty objects in Blender have Size and Display Shape parameters under Empty object properties tab - better change the size there than in Delta scale.
You can assign or change the hotkey (Shift G) to select parent or children with the up-down keys, like in Maya. Menu Select>Select grouped>Parent... And you can parent an object in the outliner just drag it, but pressing shift key
I knew this was the best BBob vid to date before the opening credits ended! By the way, when you've made some groups, click 1, 2, 3, or 4 on your number keys (top of keyboard) and watch the voodoo in the Outliner.
This intro is just excellent ! x'D Would love to hear you talking about Final Fantasy Spirits Within though... (seriously, no troll intended, this is a movie that quite impressed me back then... )
@@BlenderBob Ok, no problem. I heard that their production process was quite... laborious. But if there's nothing positive to say about it, I guess there's nothing to learn from it... Thanks for your answer, have a great day Bob ! ;)
5 was by far the best! Super handy addon. Thanks. Also thanks for explaing now to group/parent the correct way as I have no idea with best practices. Not sure if you need video ideas. But would love to see something on render enginers and how or if you should choose different renders depending on projects.
Hi, Thanks for all your efforts to bring out issues about grouping. The Machine tool addon as a solution is also much better than parenting. I wish one more facility for the group. that is once 2 or more objects are grouped. the group can act as another object that can be also transformed like any other object. For example if a an object in a group is moved or rotated all the other objects are moved and rotated as a whole. like an assembly of many components can be moved or rotated as in real life. I think this is not possible with the Machine tools group also. This approach is available in Trimble's "Sketchup" software. Here this group is called component. Any number of objects go into a component and any number of components can go into component of next level and so on. Once a component is created combining individual objects, the component becomes another object which can be transformed. If you need to edit an object in a component you only need to double click the component until you reach the required object in the hierarchy or sect the individual object in the outliner. Blender community can consider this approach for grouping objects which will be a real break through. Thank you again for your efforts and presentations to Blender users.
The plugin machin3 does most of what I wanted for grouping (and is similar to the behaviour of maya). Unfortunately animating/toggling the viewport/render-visibility in the outliner does not affect the children in the group like it is in maya.
I learned that with SHIFT + LMB you can toggl the visibility of all objects in the hierarchy but it does not let you set a keyframe this way. So if you want to animate (set a keyframe) for the visibility you would still need to do this for all objects in the hierarchy as opposed to doing this just for the group-node. Did I miss something?
Super nice video, thanks for sharing. But, you didn't touch on the subject that when you parent an object in Maya the objects origin will now be the parent object and all your transformation values will be set according to that origin and there is no easy way to do it in Blender (to my knowledge at least).
If a client changed their mind on the tire. I would bring in the new tire, and swap the mesh data block, copy over any modifiers if necessary . Done. unless of course its a different diameter but that's another story..
So what if the new tire has winter chains on it and a few nails coming out of it? It’s always better to make drivers and animations on a group. Every animator in the VFX industry will tell you the same thing.
Dude, Bob. I am planning on implementing groups in Blender. Basically having all the features that you’re talking about that I’ve been missing along with additional features like being able to apply materials and modifiers to groups and have them be conditionally applied to their children. Initially I’m prototyping this in python, but will be eventually implementing it as a native patch with a new type called group. This way it will be easily identifiable as a group in the outliner. I’ll keep you updated on my progress and when I get to a good point would love it if you could test it out and let me know what you think! After I’ve got that done I’m going to work on proxying as well as object and group instancing. Stoked on blender as a relative newcomer and excited for what we’ll be about to make as a community.
The empire strikes back feels short and small compared to all the others. It's only worth watching if you're watching all 3 in 1 sitting. Rogue one had the potential to be the best but they dropped the ball on the actual content of some of the characters and they needed to show a little more back-story.
How would you save face selections like the bevels created using Bevel or the Bevel modifier? I would manually select the bevel faces and assign a material to them, yes. Thank you.
The issue you give at 13:54 could be solved by linking the object data. Maybe there are some issues/drawbacks to this method I am currently not aware of.
Ok but the new tire has winter chains now and a few nails coming out of it. You see, swapping the geo is not always the solution. But if you work with groups, you’ll never une into that issue.
1) You can create a group of objects parented to an empty natively in Blender by using the command Add > Mesh > Parent to empty (I use to assign Ctrl+Alt+P as shortcut for that) 2) You can parent in the Outliner by Shift + Drag & Drop over the parent object 3) You can walk the selection inside a hierarchy in the 3D Viewport by simply using the square brackets keys 4) You can walk the selection inside a hierarchy in the Outliner by first pressing Shift + Right Arrow to expand the hierarchy of the parent and after that use Up and Down Arrows to walk 5) You can quickly select the whole hierarchy in the Outliner by clicking once to select the parent and clicking again on it with Alt pressed Happy blending! 8-)
I found it. You have to enable the addon "add mesh: extra objects" to see this option. I disabled the hotkey that creates those stupid hidden collections and set Parent to Empty menu option to use ctrl+g and set the option to "affect only parents" to be ctrl+, since ctrl+. is already used to toggle "affect only origins". It would be nice if holding shift+, or shift+. would temp-toggle those options like holding down D in Maya.
Doesn't the "[" and "]" keys select the parent/child object from the 3d view already. Maybe I didn't understand what you wanted. Edit: I see it doesn't work in the outliner, it really should work there also.
@@BlenderBob Right clicking in outliner and clicking "select hierarchy" is different then the "[" key in the 3d view. The "[" key let's you walk up the hierarchy, selecting the parent each time. I use it to select something in 3d view and then walk up to the parent empty that groups the objects.
You can select linked object and copy with Blender Using Shit+G-->Children and copy a linked objects too, and also you can create a Group with Blender using CRTL+G is an hidden collection and select with the same command Shif+G and select the collections you have created
Certainly there are two steps, and maybe if you have to go to the menu to look for the commands it is longer, also the use of an add-on for me is, but if you use the command Shif+G and then Shid+D it is almost instantaneous, and as you know Blender was born on this paradigm of shortcuts, not to be used with the command menu, introduced to facilitate new users. if you want to use it quickly and professionally, this is the way. However nice intro. Another tips for fast workflow is the use of custom quick menus (shortcuts "Q") you can add to this menu every things you use mostly when work I love your funny videos.
Excellent trick 😍 Merci ami Bob Par contre tu es toujours aussi crazy 😂 Tu essayes de reconcilier les côtés lumineux et sombre de la force ? Tu veux inventer la force grise ? 😁 Vivement le prochain numéro dans la série, je suis impatient 😜👍 Sinon tu peux parenter dans le outliner en déplçant l'enfant sur le parent et en appuyant sur SHIFT 😉
This is amazing! How did I not know about the Machin3Tools Add on??? I moved over to Blender from Cinema 4D about two years ago, and grouping has been one of the things I've 'missed' most (and maybe Mograph). Problem solved! @Blender Bob do you mind if I ask which Mac you're on, and how you find the performance in Blender? I swapped my primary machine from Mac to PC at about the same time as moving from C4D to Blender, but thinking about adding a new Macbook Pro back into my life. Thanks for the excellent video series.
IMac Pro xeon 8 cores, ADM 64 with 16G vram and 32G ram. It’s awesome except that Cycles doesn’t support GPU rendering. They are supposed to fix that with 3.0
@@BlenderBob No GPU in Cycles-that sounds like a deal breaker! It'll be interesting to see it that changes in 3.0, as you say. And, also, whether there will be native Metal support for Apple's M series chips... Thanks for your reply-and, again, for the video content.
I never worked in Maya. I was a poor kid. Sadly this doesn't help me It's all "inside the box" thinking, I don't care HOW Maya does the job. I care about object grouping in the OBJ file, and keeping that grouping when I import into Blender. Like or not, the OBJ file is an industry standard and in older systems those OBJ groups are the first step to rigging. THAT is what I need. A way for Blender to import that grouping information intact, maybe let me select by group for editing a morph (shape key) definitions, then save it back out in an OBJ with all that nonsense preserved. "Help me Blender Bob, your one my increasingly narrowing hopes."
Saving back to OBJ is pointless as you will lose all of Blender's attributes (modifiers, geo nodes, shader, etc). OBJ is useful for cleaning up models though, It's an old Maya trick to save your geometry when it's corrupted. I did it in Blender a few times too
two things that I just didn't like about blender 1) not being able to "move/orient" the "center pivot/selection" to where I want. 2) that when I press the "g/r/s" key, the gizmo does not appear and the object "moves/scale/rotate" like crazy with my wacom pen.
For the pivot/origin, you can change it by selecting the Origin option in the top bar where you have the snaps settings. All the way to the right. Same place if you just want to move the parent or location. For the gizmos, turn them off by clicking the gizmo button. It's on the left of the 4 buttons for display (wireframe, grey, textured, rendered) also on top right.:-)
Hey Blender Bob. Great episode! I have zero opinion on the best star wars movie but I do have a question. To be clear, parenting to empties, and building rigs upon rigs is ok? I'm asking because that's my workflow at present. I'd like to start doing serious work, and what you said sounds like good learning.
hey I just installed machine tool and tried grouping. so there is no way to make group in blender without this addon? i mean i can parent but as you shown whenever try to duplicate parents and children just by selecting parent it just duplicates parent. so isn't there any way to select and duplicate everything like machine tool without the addon?
@@BlenderBob yes machine tool selects everything and it's easier. Thanks for the video. Everytime I'm watching your videos I'm learning something new. Can you make a video on ACES workflow?
Thanks for making this video. Blender is very impressive but little things like these can really drive you crazy coming from maya. I still don´t understand how people work effeciently in Blender without grouping. How do they (native blender users) usually duplicate a whole wheel-setup in one step when only the Parent/Null-Object gets duplicated? I am always hesitant to use such plugins because I feel it´s better to learn the blender-way and not try to make it into "free Maya" (as somebody called it), but with this one I feel I have no choice if I want to stay sane.
You know, it took along time before another CG movie reached the level of quality of FF. The entire production was a total mess though. I it went like 3 times over budget.
Recently i am doing one project in 3ds max but i have started to do in blender and i got same grouping problem cause 3Ds max grouping is totally diffrent and i faced one more problem with cycle and Evee renderer is there has not object include /exclude option from light . right now i clear about grouping addon but if you have any idea about light include exclude then please help...Thanks a lot
There’s no light linking in Blender at this point but we may get it for 3.0. In the mean time you could get the same results using the technique I teach in my clip Lighting in Compositing
Light linking only means that you can select a light and tell it to just light selected objects instead of everything. We don’t have it yet in Blender.
I have to make a confession: I parented an object to another object once but I was young, dumb and needed the money. So...do I still have to do push ups? ;-) Really nice and interesting video. Keep it up. ^^
Go free, but never do it again. And if you feel the urge to parent to an object again. contact the Blender Bob Moral Support Institute. They will be able to help you.
@Blender Bob say do you have a twitter? I couldn't find you there (there are a few BlenderBobs none of whom appeared to be you) I'm asking because Julien Kaspar (Blender Studios) asked on Twitter about Maya's advantages over Blender in the UV space which seems like a discussion you'd want to be part of
@@Kram1032 If there's one thing i would like to change about UV's in Blender is that it would not automatically merge UV's when they are on the same location and share a vert... makes stacking and mirroring UV's a big mess
Why are you threatening me with pushups like it's a bad thing :D I bet my weakling body would like such change for once after sitting days in front of that blender screen xD
@@BlenderBob When someone logins into your server you could add this Login "forgot password" whereby sending me an e-mail that is listed on file. This would allow me to change the password to something I would know. This would allow me to login using this new password. Why people do this, I do not know...
He told me that you should see a link that says "forgot password" to reset it but also that there's nothing we can do on our side. Can you login on other Discord servers?
First can you still access your emails and/or discord account? If not you could try to contact the discord support but they are probably going to think that its not your account and wont change your email so i guess the only way then would be to create new mail and discord accounts.
As far as I can tell there is no difference between 2.7 and 2.8. In both if you press ctrl+g it will create a new "collection" in the blend file but not in the current scene or current view layer so nothing appears to happen in the default Outliner.
I think the correct "Blender way" of how blender should implement grouping is deffinitely Collections. Like, "locking" them, so you can either move it as a whole, or as separate components. Perhaps, allowing the user to freely turn a collection into a collection instance (Of a collection that is not linked to the scene) and turning it back if they want to edit it.
This is genius. As a Maya user for over a solid decade at WORK, I can relate as well. This is a good solution. I’ve used Lightwave, XSI, Houdini, 3DSMax, and Blender in production on billion dollar projects and can say you won’t find me participating in flame wars because it’s pointless. Software is a tool. Use what’s there and best for the job and team you’re on. Finish the show, go home, drink beer, live a bit, pet cats, play with your kids, sleep, wake up, repeat. Flame war... gets in the way of one of those things. Listen to Bob, even if you’re frozen on Hoth and just need time inside a tauntaun. If not, it’s Alderaan for you.
We could have a war between Flame and Nuke for compositing... :-)
@@BlenderBob if you call that a Flame War are you implying Flame is winning?
@@Kram1032 I prefer to stay neutral in this conflict. :-)
@@BlenderBob I'm just asking about the meta-conflict of calling it Flame War or Nuke War :P
@@BlenderBob Hahahaha! Oh yeah, except the Flame guys get paid a bit more lol! Remember Inferno?
I imagine someone told you already, but you can parent in the outliner, just prest shift while dragging over another object :)
BOB... that is the most hilarious star wars roll text ever and Luke scene.
The intro is gold. Soo goood.
Best intro for any tutorial ever
I just find you are really nice and your video is so useful, i have been struggling for the grouping problem for a while and I can't find anything useful to solve my problem, but with your video and the the super kicking ass addon, I just fell in love with blender again! thank you!
Yeah you convinced me. Groups are nice. Blender should add groups
Ok so you can shift drag to parent in the outliner. Thanks guys. But why a different workflow?
It's just a little safeguard. If it didn't require pressing Shift I would probably parent stuff accidentally all the time
Outliner has another mode called "Scene" - this was default in pre 2.8 and is more like traditional outliner and parenting works as expected by simple drag and drop + there is no confusion with Collections mixed in if you don't need them (in early stages of project).
@@rous3369 Maya uses the middle mouse to parent or for reordring so there is no accidental parenting. left click is only for selection and it's super intuitve since there is not box selction conflicting with move to collection .
Hi Blender Bob. The topic of this video hits exactly the experience we are having at the studio! But you, as a blender veteran adopting the Machin3 tool group functionality does make me think that some of that could help the Blender user experience. Like being able to simply copy or delete a hierarchy, or simply dragging a whole hierarchy in the outliner. Anyway, thanks for the video.
@@LEHtJong You're welcome! But I'm not a Blender veteran. I only started with 2.80. :-)
i think collection is not only for rendering, for example, collection instance is a great way to duplicate objects. Great lesson from you again, cheers!
Groups are standard UX even Open Office has Groups. The biggest difference between Groups and Collections is a Group is actual set of Objects vs a Collection that is a "tagged" set of Objects. With blenders new MultiObject support it would now make sense implementing Groups ( Could be possible to apply a Modifier to a Group etc., especially since there are no linked Modifiers ) . Collections work fine for Rendering but for Scene organization and as a helper for Modelling, Groups are needed.
Dude, did you actually watch the video - blender already has everything you would want from groups.. it's just not called "Groups" ?! 100% the same functionality as in Maya or Cinema4D (Except you can't add modifiers to hierarchies in Blender yet.. but not in maya either.)
@@RenderEverything blender has WORKAROUNDS or plugins for Grouping .. Its not called "Groups" cause its not a Group.
@@augm3nt384 but grouping is nothing more than hierarchical parenting. The same in Maya, C4d and Blender. All funcionality is there already without addons ( they are nothing more than shortcuts ). What do you exactly expect from grouping that is not in Blender?
@@augm3nt384 I get the point you're making but one of Blender's core selling points / strengths is the community providing tools and solutions that the base software is missing or would benefit from. To say that what is missing is an officially stamped, native Blender solution for providing a properly labeled Group function is correct--but to overlook the totally useable solution that a community member developed is sort of unnecessarily dying on a hill that need not exist.
@@FireBert85 Im not putting down addons, on the contrary thats what makes blender so much better. But for basic UX like Groups, seriously.
I had a project where I had to copy a parented object and whenever I was selecting the parent it wasn't selecting the children with it and I had to do it manually. also now I know the deference between parenting and grouping. Thanks Blender Bob.
Shift + G in viewport shows hierarchy selection menu - quickly select children, siblings etc. from there. Also in Outliner right click menu has "Select hierarchy" - just map it to keyboard shortcut (i.e. Middle mouse) to quickly select whole hierarchy with one click!
@@RenderEverything thanks a lot for this information ❤️
2:15 I loved the Final Fantasy movie 🍿
Machin3 is the Man... Tons of reasons why. The original Star Wars, 1977, is the best. Push ups don't bother me. I do tons of them all the time. Now if you want to punish someone, make them run. That's hell.
Thank you so much for the Machine3Tools BBob
Parenting, Collections, Collection Instancing. Blender have tools, Blender is powerful, Blender is just different. Maya users don't want to learn, they just want Blender to be 'Maya Free'
this was helpful, thank you
Very useful information. If you look at the outliner Filter>Restriction toggles, there are restrictions that make collections helpful with things other than rendering also, like selecting, hiding, and isolating in the viewport.
Cool thanks!
hahah the more vids i watch the more i laugh! This intro was EPIC!
hahah the BLender REbellion! wonder how you came up with this one!
Maya still has the best grouping system with a very intuitive outliner that I have seen in any other DCC , Blender's one is so messy and confusing to me.
Actually I like the ability in Blender to turn objects or groups on-off from the outliner and the holdout too. When I go back to Maya I miss that. But yeah, grouping in Maya... it just works. I make that clip to help people but in the end only a few thousand people will see it.
@@BlenderBob People coming from Max and sketchup strongly disagree.
@@myztazynizta How so?
@@myztazynizta Cool story, care to give deatils as to who and why? I come from Max and don't really get your comment.
@@myztazynizta oh god don't mention grouping in max.. XD that stuff is horribleXD
love the starwars opening lolal i love IV, V & VI :ow but i like all of them for different reason! good work on this!
Love this just for the intro, made me laugh. Also very good info, thanks for sharing!
Best tutorial intro in history!
Great content too...
Thanks, Bob! Great value.
U can drag an object to an empty,and it'll become a parent hold shift and drag ,ur welcome
Perfection. That's what you are blender bob. Perfection. Thank you.
17:50 The phantom menace is my favorite star wars episode. #ILoveThePrequels
btw, Empty objects in Blender have Size and Display Shape parameters under Empty object properties tab - better change the size there than in Delta scale.
Oh cool! Good to know!
@@BlenderBob Right click, adjust empty display size.
You can assign or change the hotkey (Shift G) to select parent or children with the up-down keys, like in Maya. Menu Select>Select grouped>Parent...
And you can parent an object in the outliner just drag it, but pressing shift key
That addon is awesoooooooommmmmeeeeeeeeeeee...........love groups........didnt know i needed them until now........thanks Bob!!
I knew this was the best BBob vid to date before the opening credits ended! By the way, when you've made some groups, click 1, 2, 3, or 4 on your number keys (top of keyboard) and watch the voodoo in the Outliner.
Oh... I remapped those keys when I started to use Blender.... whoopsy!
"Deep frozen planet of Quebec"🤣🤣🤣
And it’s summer time right now...
I don't like starwars, i love love blender.
Just watching the first 15 seconds and have to laugh ... BlenderBob is also a really talented comedian!
Haha. Damn that intro was EPIC XD
This intro is just excellent ! x'D
Would love to hear you talking about Final Fantasy Spirits Within though... (seriously, no troll intended, this is a movie that quite impressed me back then... )
Not gonna happen. It would be a bitching session. Nothing positive to say about it except working in Hawaï was awesome.
@@BlenderBob Ok, no problem.
I heard that their production process was quite... laborious.
But if there's nothing positive to say about it, I guess there's nothing to learn from it...
Thanks for your answer, have a great day Bob ! ;)
5 was by far the best!
Super handy addon. Thanks. Also thanks for explaing now to group/parent the correct way as I have no idea with best practices.
Not sure if you need video ideas. But would love to see something on render enginers and how or if you should choose different renders depending on projects.
We only use Cycles at the office. Eevee is not powerful enough and missing too many features.
YES! This is awesome!
Also, YES, please allow modifiers on empties!
Hi, Thanks for all your efforts to bring out issues about grouping. The Machine tool addon as a solution is also much better than parenting. I wish one more facility for the group. that is once 2 or more objects are grouped. the group can act as another object that can be also transformed like any other object. For example if a an object in a group is moved or rotated all the other objects are moved and rotated as a whole. like an assembly of many components can be moved or rotated as in real life. I think this is not possible with the Machine tools group also. This approach is available in Trimble's "Sketchup" software. Here this group is called component. Any number of objects go into a component and any number of components can go into component of next level and so on. Once a component is created combining individual objects, the component becomes another object which can be transformed. If you need to edit an object in a component you only need to double click the component until you reach the required object in the hierarchy or sect the individual object in the outliner. Blender community can consider this approach for grouping objects which will be a real break through. Thank you again for your efforts and presentations to Blender users.
Great video, Bob.
Now I'm gonna do PUSH UP! 😁
The plugin machin3 does most of what I wanted for grouping (and is similar to the behaviour of maya). Unfortunately animating/toggling the viewport/render-visibility in the outliner does not affect the children in the group like it is in maya.
I learned that with SHIFT + LMB you can toggl the visibility of all objects in the hierarchy but it does not let you set a keyframe this way. So if you want to animate (set a keyframe) for the visibility you would still need to do this for all objects in the hierarchy as opposed to doing this just for the group-node. Did I miss something?
Look into the quick instances (groups) default blender add on.
Hi Bob, you can shift drag an object to add it to an empty (group). Shift drag to remove it. 👍
Yeah, I just heard. But why a different workflow?
Thanks! ua-cam.com/video/NrBPnRalHxc/v-deo.html
lmfao this is a great tutorial, great intro
Super nice video, thanks for sharing. But, you didn't touch on the subject that when you parent an object in Maya the objects origin will now be the parent object and all your transformation values will be set according to that origin and there is no easy way to do it in Blender (to my knowledge at least).
It’s possible. I’m flooded with messages since yesterday and I can’t keep up! If I remember I will check it out. Cheers
If a client changed their mind on the tire. I would bring in the new tire, and swap the mesh data block, copy over any modifiers if necessary . Done. unless of course its a different diameter but that's another story..
So what if the new tire has winter chains on it and a few nails coming out of it? It’s always better to make drivers and animations on a group. Every animator in the VFX industry will tell you the same thing.
Correction: you can just press "Arrow Left" to jump up hierarchy/group
Dude, Bob. I am planning on implementing groups in Blender. Basically having all the features that you’re talking about that I’ve been missing along with additional features like being able to apply materials and modifiers to groups and have them be conditionally applied to their children. Initially I’m prototyping this in python, but will be eventually implementing it as a native patch with a new type called group. This way it will be easily identifiable as a group in the outliner. I’ll keep you updated on my progress and when I get to a good point would love it if you could test it out and let me know what you think! After I’ve got that done I’m going to work on proxying as well as object and group instancing. Stoked on blender as a relative newcomer and excited for what we’ll be about to make as a community.
Oh wow!
This is awesome mate, what's the progress so far?
As always a very helpful video, thank you very much :)
Great opening!
The empire strikes back feels short and small compared to all the others. It's only worth watching if you're watching all 3 in 1 sitting. Rogue one had the potential to be the best but they dropped the ball on the actual content of some of the characters and they needed to show a little more back-story.
And they ended it with the biggest cliché un the history of cinema: the bad guy is getting shot in the back by a good guy we thought was dead.
I love that intro ;)
Ehehe, may the force of blender addons be with you, ehehe
pickwalk by braverabbit
How would you save face selections like the bevels created using Bevel or the Bevel modifier?
I would manually select the bevel faces and assign a material to them, yes.
Thank you.
I actually have an addon that allows you to make face selection groups! Forgot the name but I can find it if you want
wonder if you can use those groups with modifiers, that would be really neat
I was waiting why bob dont tell machinetools, Hops are best at innovation in hard surface in whole 3d industry. It is the decade of opensource.
Thank you so much
The Empire Strikes Back est effectivement le meilleur, à mon avis...
The issue you give at 13:54 could be solved by linking the object data. Maybe there are some issues/drawbacks to this method I am currently not aware of.
Ok but the new tire has winter chains now and a few nails coming out of it. You see, swapping the geo is not always the solution. But if you work with groups, you’ll never une into that issue.
16:25 It literally says to hold shift to parent as you're dragging.
Oops! Some corrections to my previous clip. Thanks to everyone for the comments on the previous clip!
Thanks! ua-cam.com/video/NrBPnRalHxc/v-deo.html
1) You can create a group of objects parented to an empty natively in Blender by using the command Add > Mesh > Parent to empty (I use to assign Ctrl+Alt+P as shortcut for that)
2) You can parent in the Outliner by Shift + Drag & Drop over the parent object
3) You can walk the selection inside a hierarchy in the 3D Viewport by simply using the square brackets keys
4) You can walk the selection inside a hierarchy in the Outliner by first pressing Shift + Right Arrow to expand the hierarchy of the parent and after that use Up and Down Arrows to walk
5) You can quickly select the whole hierarchy in the Outliner by clicking once to select the parent and clicking again on it with Alt pressed
Happy blending! 8-)
Awesome! Thanks!
"...the command Add > Mesh > Parent to empty" - I do not have that option in my Add menu. "parent to empty" is not found in the menu search.
#5 also does not work. What version of Blender are you using?
I found it. You have to enable the addon "add mesh: extra objects" to see this option. I disabled the hotkey that creates those stupid hidden collections and set Parent to Empty menu option to use ctrl+g and set the option to "affect only parents" to be ctrl+, since ctrl+. is already used to toggle "affect only origins". It would be nice if holding shift+, or shift+. would temp-toggle those options like holding down D in Maya.
Thanks! ua-cam.com/video/NrBPnRalHxc/v-deo.html
Fuck! didnt know I was doing a lot of bad practices in terms of grouping. gotta do those push ups
Doesn't the "[" and "]" keys select the parent/child object from the 3d view already. Maybe I didn't understand what you wanted. Edit: I see it doesn't work in the outliner, it really should work there also.
Don't know. These two keys are complicated to use on a french keyboard.
@@BlenderBob Ah I didn't know that. For reference, the operator is called "select hierarchy", you can search for it in keybindings and rebind.
I just right click in the outliner :-)
@@BlenderBob Right clicking in outliner and clicking "select hierarchy" is different then the "[" key in the 3d view. The "[" key let's you walk up the hierarchy, selecting the parent each time. I use it to select something in 3d view and then walk up to the parent empty that groups the objects.
Oh really! I’ll give it a shot. So many hot keys in Blender. It’s insane
3:07
Thank me L8R...
You can select linked object and copy with Blender Using Shit+G-->Children and copy a linked objects too, and also you can create a Group with Blender using CRTL+G is an hidden collection and select with the same command Shif+G and select the collections you have created
Yeah but the point is that often you need many steps to do the same thing that you can do in one in Maya. :-)
Certainly there are two steps, and maybe if you have to go to the menu to look for the commands it is longer, also the use of an add-on for me is, but if you use the command Shif+G and then Shid+D it is almost instantaneous, and as you know Blender was born on this paradigm of shortcuts, not to be used with the command menu, introduced to facilitate new users. if you want to use it quickly and professionally, this is the way. However nice intro. Another tips for fast workflow is the use of custom quick menus (shortcuts "Q") you can add to this menu every things you use mostly when work I love your funny videos.
Yeah that hidden collection stuff is the last thing anyone wants on ctrl+g.
Thanks! ua-cam.com/video/NrBPnRalHxc/v-deo.html
great :)
Excellent trick 😍 Merci ami Bob
Par contre tu es toujours aussi crazy 😂
Tu essayes de reconcilier les côtés lumineux et sombre de la force ? Tu veux inventer la force grise ? 😁
Vivement le prochain numéro dans la série, je suis impatient 😜👍
Sinon tu peux parenter dans le outliner en déplçant l'enfant sur le parent et en appuyant sur SHIFT 😉
This is amazing! How did I not know about the Machin3Tools Add on??? I moved over to Blender from Cinema 4D about two years ago, and grouping has been one of the things I've 'missed' most (and maybe Mograph). Problem solved!
@Blender Bob do you mind if I ask which Mac you're on, and how you find the performance in Blender? I swapped my primary machine from Mac to PC at about the same time as moving from C4D to Blender, but thinking about adding a new Macbook Pro back into my life.
Thanks for the excellent video series.
IMac Pro xeon 8 cores, ADM 64 with 16G vram and 32G ram. It’s awesome except that Cycles doesn’t support GPU rendering. They are supposed to fix that with 3.0
@@BlenderBob No GPU in Cycles-that sounds like a deal breaker! It'll be interesting to see it that changes in 3.0, as you say. And, also, whether there will be native Metal support for Apple's M series chips...
Thanks for your reply-and, again, for the video content.
I never worked in Maya. I was a poor kid.
Sadly this doesn't help me
It's all "inside the box" thinking, I don't care HOW Maya does the job. I care about object grouping in the OBJ file, and keeping that grouping when I import into Blender.
Like or not, the OBJ file is an industry standard and in older systems those OBJ groups are the first step to rigging.
THAT is what I need. A way for Blender to import that grouping information intact, maybe let me select by group for editing a morph (shape key) definitions, then save it back out in an OBJ with all that nonsense preserved.
"Help me Blender Bob, your one my increasingly narrowing hopes."
Saving back to OBJ is pointless as you will lose all of Blender's attributes (modifiers, geo nodes, shader, etc). OBJ is useful for cleaning up models though, It's an old Maya trick to save your geometry when it's corrupted. I did it in Blender a few times too
Great video, sir. But, I am genuinely curious. Why would you not want to see the empty?
Imagine you are working on Optimus Prime. So many groups that you would have crosses all over the place.
two things that I just didn't like about blender
1) not being able to "move/orient" the "center pivot/selection" to where I want.
2) that when I press the "g/r/s" key, the gizmo does not appear and the object "moves/scale/rotate" like crazy with my wacom pen.
For the pivot/origin, you can change it by selecting the Origin option in the top bar where you have the snaps settings. All the way to the right. Same place if you just want to move the parent or location. For the gizmos, turn them off by clicking the gizmo button. It's on the left of the 4 buttons for display (wireframe, grey, textured, rendered) also on top right.:-)
Nyc information 👍
so short video men! you need to make 3 days video about grouping or more
star wars old ones!
Hey Blender Bob. Great episode! I have zero opinion on the best star wars movie but I do have a question. To be clear, parenting to empties, and building rigs upon rigs is ok? I'm asking because that's my workflow at present. I'd like to start doing serious work, and what you said sounds like good learning.
You can have as many group levels as you need. Just never parent on objects.
@@BlenderBob thank you so much for the time you're taking to share the learning!
Great stuff!
hey I just installed machine tool and tried grouping. so there is no way to make group in blender without this addon? i mean i can parent but as you shown whenever try to duplicate parents and children just by selecting parent it just duplicates parent. so isn't there any way to select and duplicate everything like machine tool without the addon?
Yeah, In the outliner, right click on the empty and do select hierarchy.
@@BlenderBob yes machine tool selects everything and it's easier. Thanks for the video. Everytime I'm watching your videos I'm learning something new. Can you make a video on ACES workflow?
Thanks for making this video. Blender is very impressive but little things like these can really drive you crazy coming from maya.
I still don´t understand how people work effeciently in Blender without grouping. How do they (native blender users) usually duplicate a whole wheel-setup in one step when only the Parent/Null-Object gets duplicated?
I am always hesitant to use such plugins because I feel it´s better to learn the blender-way and not try to make it into "free Maya" (as somebody called it), but with this one I feel I have no choice if I want to stay sane.
damn the machinetool is the shit.
OMG! This intro is perfect!
FF:SW was an awesome movie. Blew my mind.
What a difference 15 years makes to technology.
You know, it took along time before another CG movie reached the level of quality of FF. The entire production was a total mess though. I it went like 3 times over budget.
@@BlenderBob Was it because it was a new studio or was it the technology?
Or was it something else completely?
Mostly lack or organization and cultural conflicts
Recently i am doing one project in 3ds max but i have started to do in blender and i got same grouping problem cause 3Ds max grouping is totally diffrent and i faced one more problem with cycle and Evee renderer is there has not object include /exclude option from light . right now i clear about grouping addon but if you have any idea about light include exclude then please help...Thanks a lot
There’s no light linking in Blender at this point but we may get it for 3.0. In the mean time you could get the same results using the technique I teach in my clip Lighting in Compositing
@@BlenderBob ok thanks Sir
Do this for light linking.... totally don't understand what it is lol.
Light linking only means that you can select a light and tell it to just light selected objects instead of everything. We don’t have it yet in Blender.
@@BlenderBob Ah!! That makes sense! Thx.
Hahaha, like after prolog.
I have to make a confession: I parented an object to another object once but I was young, dumb and needed the money. So...do I still have to do push ups? ;-)
Really nice and interesting video. Keep it up. ^^
Go free, but never do it again. And if you feel the urge to parent to an object again. contact the Blender Bob Moral Support Institute. They will be able to help you.
recommand group pro addon,,like3dmax group style
I’ll check it out
Select a child. Press [ to select the parent
@Blender Bob say do you have a twitter? I couldn't find you there (there are a few BlenderBobs none of whom appeared to be you)
I'm asking because Julien Kaspar (Blender Studios) asked on Twitter about Maya's advantages over Blender in the UV space which seems like a discussion you'd want to be part of
I do but under my real name. I already had a videoconference with him. Thanks.
@@BlenderBob Ah I see now, you even already replied to the tweet in question. Hadn't seen your reply before, nice
@@Kram1032 I have a double identity...
@@BlenderBob *gasp*
@@Kram1032 If there's one thing i would like to change about UV's in Blender is that it would not automatically merge UV's when they are on the same location and share a vert... makes stacking and mirroring UV's a big mess
YO CAN "DRAG & DROP in BLENDER OUTLINER" !!!! -Hold Shift- then drag the item over another item to parent to it. Maya sucks... BLENDER RULES !!!! :-)
Hey Blender Bob, how this add on work if i send my file for user doesn't have this add on?
I have no idea!
Why are you threatening me with pushups like it's a bad thing :D I bet my weakling body would like such change for once after sitting days in front of that blender screen xD
I do it because I care. One day you will understand...
why can't we access the subtitle as usual
No idea....
I was going to signup at your your discord server and I found someone else is using my e-mail address. How do I go about having that changed??
That's very strange. How can someone use your email address? There's nothing I can do on my side. Maybe contact Discord directly?
@@BlenderBob When someone logins into your server you could add this Login "forgot password" whereby sending me an e-mail that is listed on file. This would allow me to change the password to something I would know. This would allow me to login using this new password. Why people do this, I do not know...
@@Everyday_Foreman I sent a message to my Discord server admin to check it out.
He told me that you should see a link that says "forgot password" to reset it but also that there's nothing we can do on our side. Can you login on other Discord servers?
First can you still access your emails and/or discord account? If not you could try to contact the discord support but they are probably going to think that its not your account and wont change your email so i guess the only way then would be to create new mail and discord accounts.
HAHAHA this intro
but did you know, grouping system blender 2.7 below is horrible?
No I started using Blender with 2.80
As far as I can tell there is no difference between 2.7 and 2.8. In both if you press ctrl+g it will create a new "collection" in the blend file but not in the current scene or current view layer so nothing appears to happen in the default Outliner.
I think the correct "Blender way" of how blender should implement grouping is deffinitely Collections. Like, "locking" them, so you can either move it as a whole, or as separate components. Perhaps, allowing the user to freely turn a collection into a collection instance (Of a collection that is not linked to the scene) and turning it back if they want to edit it.
five [ Grouped ] with three and four
post this on rightclickselect
I post all of my clips there and usually on Monday morning so we can see it in Blender Today. I didn’t have time to finish it in time.
Omg groups sucks in maya and Blender. You should see how awesome they are in 3dsmax. 😝
Yeah, you're not the first one to tell me about this. :-)
Cinema4d is better of both.🙂