Advise about combining many small bodies to a componenet

[zipo13]

Hi,
I recently designed s poker chip:

The result is that every different color part is a different body, and I have about 34 of them.

I put them into groups, and I'm pretty happy with the result.

When I export it into a 3mf file, I see that all the bodies are there, and I need to assign a color for each one in the slicer.

It's not too bad, but I feel I'm doing something wrong.
What I want is to combine all the black parts into a single body/component, and the same for the red ones.

First I just grouped them in to groups - didn't help

Then, I tried to combine bodies with “combine” and all it did is to move the combined bodies outside the group.

Then I created an empty component and dragged the bodies there.

This resulted in not being able to export the 2 components in the same 3mf file, and the slicer still showed all the bodies under the component.

And I lost the timeline...

So I undid everything, what is the best practice here?

[jhackney1972]

You did not supply your model so I wiped up a small demo with 3 separate bodies.  The video will show the process of creating one component from the three bodies.