Tutorials

 

Getting Around in trueSpace 5 and 6

Page 4

Quick-jump to topics in this tutorial:

  1. Help is available!
  2. Selecting views
  3. Finding the tools and options
  4. Creating a primitive
  5. Drawing curves with the drawpanel tool
  6. Selecting faces/edges/vertices
  7. Grouping and ungrouping
  8. Texturing (Texturing, Textures, Layers, Light emitting textures, Animated textures, Applying the texture)
  9. Lighting
  10. Animating (Animation Control Group and Animation Parameters, Keyframe Editor/Scene Editor, Rendering the Animation, Animation Paths)
  11. Simulations 
  12. Rendering
  13. Layers in trueSpace 6

 

7. Grouping and ungrouping

 
You can group objects as either siblings or parent-child/children. In trueSpace, you do this with the "Glue as Sibling" and the "Glue as Child" tools (Fig. 7.1). Select your first object, then choose the glue tool you want (your cursor will be changed into a glue bottle), then click on the objects you want to glue to the first one.  After they are grouped, the whole group can be selected and manipulated as one, or you can select the individual objects and work on them separately. You can select the individual objects within a group either by navigating down the hierarchy with the the keyboard arrows, or within the Keyframe Editor (tS5) or Scene Editor (tS6) (Fig. 7.2).

 Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2

 

n the Keyframe Editor/Scene Editor,  if there is a + sign in front of your object's name, it means that it is grouped.  Click on the + sign to get the drop-down list of the objects within the group.  To select an object within the group, click on its name. Now you can access and edit just that particular object. If you want to work on the group as a whole again, just click on the name of the whole group. Here again it helps if you named your objects, because it will be easier to find them. When you group two or more objects together, the group will get a default name. Right-click on the object tool to open up the Object Info panel and give the group a unique name.  

The advantage of using different kinds of grouping (parent/child and siblings) is that when you set up a hierarchy carefully, it will be easier to edit different parts of your group in the future. For example, in the attached picture (above right) you can see that the limbs are grouped as siblings. This means that if you want to do the same kind of editing on all the arms and legs (e.g. to put the same texture on all of them), you don't have to select each individual object - you can just select "limbs", do the editing you want, and it will be applied to all the objects within this subgroup, but not to the others.

To ungroup an item, first select it, then choose the "Unglue" tool. Or, inside the Keyframe Editor (tS5) or Scene Editor (tS6), select the item, right-click on it, and choose "Unglue" from the pop-up list.

 

 

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Copyright ©  2002-2012 by Susan Lee.