- [Man] When you wish to select
and or manipulate multiple objects
as a unit, you can collect them into a group.
Groups also help to declutter the Scene Explorer
by reducing the number of objects listed at the root level.
I can create a group from the three parts of this lamp
or light fixture.
I can select them in the viewpoints
by just drawing a red rectangle around them
because I've frozen all of the other objects in the scene.
We can see in the Scene Explorer that lamp cord, lamp frame
and lamp glass are currently selected.
Go into the main max menus to group and choose group.
And then we want to give this a name.
I do recommend leaving the word group in the name
of the group, just to make it easier to identify in a list.
So I'll call this lamp group and click okay.
And as we saw in the previous movie,
we've got a hierarchy here.
If we open up lamp group,
we can see that it's got some members.
If we deselect them by clicking on nothing
and then select in the viewport,
we effectively select all the members of the group.
And then we can transform them.
We can use the move tool over to our perspective view.
Maybe right click in there and position that in X, Y, or Z.
Okay. I'll undo that.
The fact that I can select the group
without selecting its members kind of indicates
that the group itself is an object.
It's a container for objects
but that container itself is usually not visible.
We can make it visible by opening up the group
which will allow us to select individual members
in the viewport.
With that group selected, we can go back into the main menus
to group open.
Once we've done that we see a pink bracket
around the group members, and that's the group node itself.
We can select the group node
by clicking on that pink bracket.
And we can see it's selected the group node here
in the Scene Explorer
or indeed we can select individual members directly
in the the viewport here.
And if we wanted to, we could transform them.
We're going to leave them the way they were.
Once we're done working
with individual objects we can close the group.
We can select any group member or the group node itself,
go back into the main menus and choose group close.
If we wanted to destroy the group,
we can do that very easily by selecting any member
and going back into the group menu.
And we could go ahead and choose ungroup.
I'm not going to do that now, I want to keep this group.
But if I wanted to destroy it, that would be the process.
So a group is an invisible transform node.
It's a container for objects.
So a node is an entity in the scene such as an object,
a material or an animation controller,
and a transform node is an object
that has a position rotation and scale.
So the group node, effectively,
is an invisible transform node,
and we can only select it in the viewports
if the group is open.
Groups are very helpful to declutter the Scene Explorer.
So for example, I could create a group
for all of the pergola cross-beam objects.
I can dolly out
with control, alt and middle mouse button.
I've got all these pergola cross-beams.
I could put all of those into a group if I wanted.
I can just go over here to the Scene Explorer
and select all of them using the shift key,
selected the first one, scroll down to the bottom,
hold down shift and select the last one.
And with all of those selected,
I can go ahead and go to group, group.
And once again, given a name with the word group in it.
So I'll call it pergola cross-beam group, and click okay.
So now that has given us the ability to collapse this.
So it's taking up a lot less space here
in our Scene Explorer.
That's how to work with groups, create open
and close them destroy them
and use them to declutter the Scene Explorer.