Group objects (not merge/voxel)

Feature Request
1

I really am sorry if this has been asked or if there’s a easy work around that has been published. I looked through much of the requests & didn’t see this listed, so here goes:

It would be great, if in the Scene menu where you find all your objects, we also had the option to Group them into a collapsible list. Procreate/Photoshop & many other 2D apps have this feature.

It’s great for organizing/linking many elements that work together.

A use example would be:

You have a character sculpture, on the character’s head you have a pair of glasses using refraction, hair, teeth, eyes, an Additive element and so on. You can’t simple merge them because you’ll lose the refracted glass and or the additive element. Also, you might not want to simple merge, bc you might want to move the elements around or add to independently later without spilling them in the same menu and then having to dig through what is what as it will label them all the same.

So in this situation you would check mark all “Head” elements & then “group them” and label that group as “head” or whatever.

Now when you select the Group’s title bar/header you can move them all together as per usual. But also you can select individual elements to work on them. You can also collapse the group to show only it’s title/header and save space in your scene list.

This would be extremely useful for large sculpts with many elements.

My work around has been to label each element in reference to the location, something like “ HEAD- Glasses” & “HEAD- Hat” then move them all together in the menu so they are kinda grouped. But when looking at it on a large sculpt it’s extremely cumbersome.

Thanks and thanks for this amazing app!!

7 Likes
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It’s probably the most requested feature.

The feature is planned (since almost a year though)

7 Likes
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  1. Sorry for repeating a feature request.

  2. Your probably the most responsive app developer this side of the galaxy.

  3. Thanks

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Don’t want to push this thread too much further but I was wondering based on the original post if grouping could work like simple merge except objects keep their material and names. Never realized that the functionality was almost there with this feature. The underlying architecture may not easily permit this though?

1 Like
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It’ll be a scene hierarchy, you won’t be able to sculpt on multiple mesh at the same time.
The intermediary mode will probably have transform information so you’ll be able to use gizmo/transform.

9 Likes
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I think that grouping alone is fine…if one needs to sculpt Over the entire surface, that’s what merging is for :).

I do a lot of mechanical hard surface stuff, and so for me, I could use grouping with saveable pivot points (for persistent rigging) and parenting of objects.

That said, I LOVE NS. I cannot imagine how much work went into this program. It’s a marvel on par with Blender’s early days, or Stardew valley or something. Just crazy good.

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@thetutorialdoctor Yeah, the naming thing is what I found last night too; once “simple merged”, all names inherit the name of the merged object. For me, I spend a lot of effort to ensure my object list is named correctly, so I can quickly select things for posing. So, I can’t “simple merge” because both names of objects and their pivots are lost. Eventually, you have to decide though, since w/o merging the poly/vertex count gets really high.

1 Like