Right now you can assign attributes only to rhino objects which is sometimes very limiting aspect. You can not easily create hierarchies of objects for report.
Blocks are not solution.
For example if you have one railing composed of 25 pieces of geometry and you want to say to all the objects that you are part of a railing you have to assign the name to all 25 objects.
I suggest just basic grouping (group maybe better called set would be a new rhino object acting like a container with capability to carry user attributes) with as many level as neccessary so you can group 5 objects and assign attriutes to that fictitious group and say you are “railing n1” and group all the railings and say “all the railings”.
It would be nice then in the report so you see this object is part of this set and this is part of this superset.
Well, not that I don’t agree having some kind of assembly grouping, but you can always use UserText attributes and together with a couple of scripts you may get what you need
thats how i do it right now i have keys called super set, set, subset so i manually say to each object to what subset it belongs. but this is not very elegant since all the grouping depends on the values you assign to the keys which is manual work and you have to carry in mind all the “group” names… groups would have ids and in the report there would be group column, group id column, group attributes and objects belonging to the group would be formatted/strutured below so it is apparent that these objects below to that group. number of levels of nesting would be just up to you.
right now there is no way in rhino to say that these many many objects belong where, except using layers.
groups would be just simple containers for objects without any funcionality except having id and user attributes
i find it very important thing for big models management… right now i have got 2500 objects in rhino which are all object part of railing system on the bridge. i want to group them according to my needs and for reporting.
There was a suggestion a while ago from @brian regarding an idea to restructure how blocks are being handled. Maybe this is something they could add to the list.
It does seem interesting.
When I have to group objects I use a script I developed.
The script makes use of UserText and EventWatcher that takes care that objects attached to one object will follow it when transformed (mainly translation)
yes scripts can do almost anything but this comes as level 1 functionality and nothing is better than a native thing… i just say sketchup has this figured out and working just fine. groups in sketchup are like unique blocks and components are like blocks. and they work fine even for reporting in su. so just the same logic could be used in rhino. i expect in rhino 7 blocks and maybe this thing groups will be introduced and brought to perfection :))