very dumb selection/deselection question (deselect objects in groop)

[Anonymous]

Lets say I have 8 cubes. The fist 4 cubes are in groop A the other 4 cubes are groop B and groop A and B are agian grooped in groop C.

I select groop C and want to only deselect a couple of cubes inside its hierarchy. So I press 'Select'>'Hierarchy' to select the individual groops and the cubes themself. I want to be able to now deselect the desired cubes in the viewport by CTRL clicking and marque selecting. When doing so the highlighting of the cube's transform node gets darker, but the shape node stays highlighted. Even deselcting both nodes in the outliner does not get rid of the viewport selection of this cube.

Selecting the Hierarchy and then pressing the downarrow a couple of times to get to the shapenodes level atleast helps when deselecting over the outliner, but deselecting in the viewport does not work still. Why is tthat?

[mspeer]

Hi!

1. Don't use Select -> Hierarchy in this case, it may select more nodes than you want.

2. If you select a group, all cubes in this group will be highlighted to show what the group consists of but only the group transform node is selected, not the individual cubes. If you want to select only a few individual cubes, then just select only the individual cubes and not their group nodes.

For example if you add a turbulence effect to a group of objects (only group transform selected), they move like if they where 1 combined mesh.

If you add a turbulence effect to the individual objects, they move all in different directions, although they are contained in the same group.

And never select the group and some contained objects at the same time, except you really need to, this will lead to weird behavior (but you can do some funny animations if you know how to handle it).

Try it, in a group A with 5 cubes select the group A and additional 2 of the cubes, then use the move tool. The 2 cubes move twice as much as the others, because they receive 2 transform operations, first inherited from the group transform node and on top their own transform.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your reply!

I came up with this question because I have an interiorset and I want to assign a material to a lot of objects at once. Fortunately all the desired objects are grooped, but there are only four objects in this group I do not want this material on. So I thought it would be somehow possible to select the groop, convert the selection to its hierarchy and then just deselect the four objects I do not want. As you said this does not work. 

Is there a different way of doing it? Because it is alot more straightforward way of working instead of having to select every object per hand. Of course I can then create a quickselection set, but first I have to go the long way of selecting everything.

[mspeer · Accepted solution]

Hi!

There are many options to select objects, e.g:

- Main Menu: Select -> All By Type -> Polygon Geometry

- Hypershade: Select Objects With Materials

the most common In Outliner would be to use standard shift-select for multiple objects.

Group A:

1. CTRL+Click first Object

2. CTRL+SHIFT+Click last object

Group B:

1. CTRL+Click first Object

2. CTRL+SHIFT+Click last object

...

After this you can deselect every object you don't want with CTRL+Click.