When a model is imported in Visualize, Visualize will place it into your model tree and, depending on the Import Settings you chose during importation, will automatically create groupings of your parts. You can quickly identify a group in Visualize by checking to see if there’s a drop-down arrow next to an entry in your model tree.
NOTE: The assembly shown in this article has been imported with the “Appearance” import setting. This was done in order to make it easier to demonstrate how the “Group” command works, since other import options have automatic grouping protocols that will make manually grouping parts in Visualize a little more difficult.
We can see that Visualize has actually already created a group for us named “Root” under the model “Headset Assembly”. Visualize will always create a “Root” group under every model that is imported into Visualize and if we were to change our selector tool to “Group” and we were to click on any part in the viewport, we’d see that the entire headset would highlight.
We can see that we didn’t actually select the MODEL, but rather simply selected the “Root” group in the model tree. The entire assembly was highlighted as a result of every part in this particular project being a part of the “Root” group.
You can create your own sub-groups in Visualize in order to move parts together as a unit. This makes it easier to move multiple parts, while still preserving their relative positions to each other, without having to CTRL+Click each component. To create your own groups, first select two or more parts:
Once this is done, you can see the “Create New Group” button appear in the property manager. Here, we’re going to group our Voice Pickup and WireHousing parts together into a single group so that we can move them together more easily.
After we’ve clicked “Create New Group”, we can immediately see a few changes in our project. First, our Voice Pickup and WireHousing parts were moved into a new group named “Part Group 1” that was created. Also, when we use the “Group” selector tool to click on either part in the graphical viewport, we see that only the components in Part Group 1 become highlighted (as opposed to the entire Root group). We can now move both components as one without any issues using the Object Manipulation Tools.
If, at any point, you’d like to ungroup your parts, you can dissolve a group by right clicking on the group name and clicking on “Ungroup Parts”.
After doing this, we can see that Part Group 1 has now become empty (no drop down arrow) and the Voice Pickup and WireHousing parts have been moved back into the same level as the rest of the model.
Once a group has been created, you can also add parts to that group by either clicking and dragging the component into the group in the model tree or by right-clicking the part and going to “Move Part(s) to Group” and choosing the group you’d like to move the part to.
Also, note that you can group together different parts and you can even group together other groups, however you cannot group together models nor can you group together parts from different groups (this includes parts from different models).
If you experience any difficulty in creating Groups in Visualize, they may have to do with your import settings (an appearance based import is more easily grouped than one that uses an automatic setting for instance).
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