Wish: Subselect Group

subselecting a group in a group is currently not possible, though an object can be selected in a group, or am i missing something?

technically there is no such thing as a group within a group (in Rhino). Objects can be assigned to multiple groups, so not sure how you want this to work.

what does technically mean?


in the following file there is a little dummy setup with 2 ikea cupboards as one group. if you ungroup once, you will have 2 groups/cupboards remaining which consist of further groups. if you ungroup one of these cupboards you will have 2 more groups remaining, legs and the corpus. if you ungroup the corpus you will have the front and the rest separate, also ungrouping the legs will result in separate legs. so clearly groups within groups… i am not sure how to explain that better.

now in a working scenario i would like to move one of the cupboards (groups) with in this group without having to ungroup, or copy the group of legs to a different corpus without having to ungroup multiple times destroying the complex group structures. i can do that by carefully subselecting all parts but that is sometimes not possible even if you use a surgical knife…

group in group dummy.3dm (289.9 KB)

the issue gets even more complicated in a real life scenario not in something like this.

In this example, how do you propose you’d select one group of legs only?
-wim

In Rhino Groups are not very strong / strict.
Groups are not hierarchical.

example above - 4 groups
the squares in the corner each belong to 2 groups.

An object can belong to multiple groups, but groups are not nested.

Without any hierarchy the upper left squares (pink) and the inner grey square can also form an additional group…

simple_multigroup.3dm (139.7 KB)

use the command selgroup. as you can see the group has a unique group ID and is selectable even within a deeper group. now if groups would work with subselect like selgroup… happy i would be :flushed:

of course in the usual pop up like so (random example)

Bildschirmfoto 2022-11-19 um 18.07.08

While it appears like that there is no deeper group. All groups are only one deep like @Tom_P illustrated. But what happens is that the group that the object was added to last will get selected when you select the object. A pop up of the groups it was added to could indeed be a solution. @encephalon is this what you propose?

i believe so yes. to resume in other words, if a subselected object showing all the groups it is part of in the selection pop up either.

thanks guys, i changed the title to something more succinct and technical correct

thanks, I logged this as RH-71460 Wish: Ability to select a group when an object is present in more than one group

1 Like

thanks @Gijs. i thought it might make more sense to limit it to subselect, regularly selecting a group does not have to pop up all the bells and whistles imo.

by the way, congrats, it seems you are now part of that team :slight_smile: i liked your old logo more though…

Can you clarify this part? The way I interpret it is the case where an object is part of two or more groups and therefore becomes ambiguous which group you want to select. So you get the pop-up that shows the most recent one on top of the list followed by the other groups the clicked object belongs to.

Thanks, yes I joined McNeel just this Friday and am excited for the things to come. As for the logo, something weird happened last night and I didn’t change that myself. It probably has to do with different accounts. In any case I will be replacing my (company) logo with a picture of myself anyway shortly.

1 Like

hm, well to interweave several entities into independent groups one has to actually subselect one of the groups/objects which is by the way these groups are created different from a regular pseudo nested grouping where you keep grouping ahead without subselecting where all entities are chronologically ordered.

if rhino could ID the difference between subselected groups and regularly (non subselected) created groups, subselecting could pop up the groups which were created non subselected. but even if not, i would not change the current behaviour.

to entirely pop up all the groups one entity belongs to by clicking on it if i did not misunderstand that now, breaks the regular workflow. pop up when several objects overlay are more a compromise i would say. right now when i select a group the last group is simply selected without prompting me, which in my workflow at least usually are not groups with entities of different groups anyway. i would keep it simple i mean, pop up only when subselect.

Okay, so in the example of the 2 cabinets you posted, if you click on one of the legs of the left cabinet, it would still by default select the group as it does now, but you want a subselect option that would in this example give a popup with the group of legs and the group of the complete left cabinet. Do I get this right? I can then adjust this in the request.

1 Like

yup that would be it i think. thanks for chowing that through with me!

thanks, I adjusted the request accordingly

1 Like