- [Narrator] So, as we start building our sheet bodies
and surfaces, it becomes very important, basically
it's imperative, that you organize your tree.
Now, the part navigator can get very muddied up quickly
because as you start building stuff, you're gonna
be building a lot of curves, you're gonna be building
intersections and projections, all sorts of datums,
surfaces, until you get your final solid body.
So until you do that, you wanna make sure
that you have a nice, organized tree.
Otherwise, it can get kinda difficult to figure out
what's linked where, how things are tied to one another,
and so on.
So there's a tool that I like to use here
called feature groups.
It allows me to clean this tree up a little bit.
So, if I look at the way this is structured,
I have a spline, and off of that spline I have
some datum planes built and some sketches.
Well, these are the basic frames that I'm using
to create my surface.
So these are the most basic reference elements, right?
I've basically driven my bridge curves,
I've driven my extrudes, and so on, off of these elements.
So, I like to organize my tree in such a way where
I can right mouse click, I can go down
to feature group, and just give it a name.
And again, I use frame.
And as I give it a name, you'll notice that
I walk down a little bit, and I can see that there's
my spline, the datum plane that I initially picked.
If there's something else that I wanna add,
and I realize oh, you know what, I have these
bridge curves that I wanna add as well...
I can pick those bridge curves, you'll notice
that the highlight's in the tree as well, here,
and bring that over.
And now I've got these points, the datum plane,
and anything else that you may want to bring over,
you can bring over into that feature group.
So if you accidentally forget to pick something,
you can go back and just simply select it here
and bring it over.
Once I do that, I have a name, I get all the
features that I want into that feature group,
I'm gonna simply select OK, and it dumps it out for me.
Now, if I open this up, you can see all of the elements
that I picked are now nestled in that feature group.
You'll see that it also just moved it
down to the very bottom.
I'm going to now clean this up even more.
So for that, I have these planes, and that spline.
I'm gonna right mouse click on that,
and you're gonna see me go into feature group.
And it's gonna say, hey, we have automatically set
new feature group position to be the owning
feature group of the selected features.
What it's telling you is that the position
of the group that I'm creating
is going to be set inside of this feature group.
So you can nest these, and that's what that big
message is telling you, saying the owning position
in the tree, it's talking about where it's at in
the part navigator, is going to be that feature group.
If you look, you can say at the top level,
and it'll put it again at the top level.
So for this, you have to give it a name,
and once you give it a name, select OK,
you'll notice that it just simply puts that group
inside of the top level group.
So, these are very dynamic, meaning I can now take this,
if I wanna move it, you can just grab it
and say, you know, I wanna see it at the top.
It doesn't really stick to a certain position
in the tree the way that it normally would.
So, it allows you to organize the tree.
Maybe you created something later on in time
and you just wanna take it and use that
as part of the base or part of the frame,
you can go back and add it in.
So if I go to this feature group and
I double click on it, you'll notice these are
the features that are in that feature group.
So I can go back and add something in.
Maybe I wanna add this datum coordinate.
Bring that in, select OK, and now you'll see
there's my datum coordinate system.
So, real easy to manipulate these, real easy to
take these and place them where you want in the tree.
So, again, if I take this feature group and I wanna
move it, maybe I wanna move this up to here,
you'll see it is now at the very top.
So, you can have as many of these, you can nest them,
and they really clean up the model a lot.
Maybe you're doing an entire body side off of a car,
you're gonna have a lot of data,
it's important to clean that up.