DeleD Community Edition

[Vijchti]

It's sometimes a pain to track down every shape in the Scene Inspector just to see where it belongs. If we could create folders to organize the objects in there (ie. a folder for "building 1" where we place all objects for that building into a collapsible folder), we could work that much quicker as well as have another way to organize and manipulate objects without having to deal with groups.

(For anyone who knows how Macromedia Flash handles folders for objects, you'll be familiar with this.)
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"Psst, Here's a secret...Your last mortal thought will be,
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[Jeroen]

Interesting idea, but isn't a folder a kind of group anyway? Improved grouping functionality is pretty high on our list and will get the attention it needs after we improved our plugin architecture (busy with that one right now). Off topic: that plugin architecture will be working with XML data as DeleD 1.54 is now capable of writing its data to XML.

[Vijchti]

I suppose, although I was thinking that it would be useful more for organization than grouping. It's also a pain to group and ungroup objects when I want to work with them individually, this addition would solve that problem.
_________________

"Psst, Here's a secret...Your last mortal thought will be,
'Why did I take so many days - just like today - for granted?'"

[Jeroen]

To me, a group is just a collection of primitives. The user should be able to click on an individual primitive and work with it, as well as working on the group as a whole. This is what we'll work on next.

[Vijchti]

Well, if you don't go for the folders idea, you could add some functionality to grouping to make it easier to work with individual objects. For example, you could shift+click once on an object to select it and shift+click again to select the group that it belongs to.

...actually, I'd like to see that either way, if possible.
_________________

"Psst, Here's a secret...Your last mortal thought will be,
'Why did I take so many days - just like today - for granted?'"

[jwatte]

Groups are probably fine, assuming some basics are taken care of:

- Groups of groups must be possible
- Groups need some kind of visual indication
- Moving a "Group" should move all attached geometry and sub-groups
- It should be able to work in a mode where groups are "exploded" but still exist, so that I can move a given thing within a group without having to do multi-step selection

Once that's all done, DeleD "groups" turn into something similar to 3ds Max "Nodes" (like the dummy object) which would be just fine by me :-)

[Jeroen]

Groups in groups is a nice feature to have, but I'm wondering how far to go here. Groups in groups in groups in groups in... Where does 3DSMax stop?

[jwatte]

3dsMax separates groups from hierarchy -- what I'm suggesting is trying to make them the same, if that simplifies your implementation (and it probably would).

In 3ds Max, you can build a hierarchy as deep as you want. You can also group groups into groups as deep as you want. There's no reason to limit the user.

I'd like to see the groups (and then sub-groups, ...) as collapsible nodes in the scene browser, like a file tree.

[Jeroen]

I have been designing a technical implementation of this functionality (groups in groups in groups etc) and I think I got it covered. We have yet to determine the impact of that implementation so we can decide whether or not to go for it or not. Will keep you guys posted!