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Scaling Grouped Items?

DekeDeke Posts: 1,631
in New Users

I have a group of beach-ball type items that I'd like to scale flat and wide to it appears they are deflating. When I scale the whole group, however, each element in the group moves apart. Is there a way to scale the group as one element?

Comments

  • L'AdairL'Adair Posts: 9,479

    You can group objects together using the Create > New Group action.

    When you create a new group, a dialog window will open for naming the group. You can select the objects first, and then create the group, or you can create an empty group and in the Scene tab, drag and drop objects into the group. As you are actually parenting the objects to the group, the option to Parent in Place needs to be enabled. The fastest way to reach it in this situation is to open the Scene menu, (small icon with an arrow and several lines,) in the uppermost corner of the pane, closest to the Viewport. Click on the menu, and the option is close to the bottom.

     

  • DekeDeke Posts: 1,631

    The problem isn't creating the group, it's scaling that group of items. It may be due to where the pivot point is in each item, so when I'm scaling the group, each element of the group is pulled in a different direction based on where that pivot point is at. 

  • L'AdairL'Adair Posts: 9,479
    edited August 2019
    Deke said:

    The problem isn't creating the group, it's scaling that group of items. It may be due to where the pivot point is in each item, so when I'm scaling the group, each element of the group is pulled in a different direction based on where that pivot point is at. 

    Odd. I tested this before answering and when I scaled the group, the objects stayed together. Here's the image I created, with three sections. The top section is three spheres without scaling, (the three separate are in the same locations as the three in the group.)

    The second section shows the three individual spheres with Y Scale set to 20%, and the third section shows the three spheres in the group, with the Y Scale 20% applied to the group. (Notice the highlighted/Selected items in the Scene tab on the right.)

    Scaling Group Vs Individual Objects

    ETA: These are sphere primitives and the origin is in the center of each as they face camera, (Z Negative axis.) I didn't try moving the origin.

    ETA2: And… I just rotated the spheres so the origin is in different places and when I Scaled the group down, the spheres flattened based on where their origin is. I suspect that is what you're seeing.

    Do you need to move them around individually?. You could hide everything but the "beach-balls" and export them as one OBJ. Import the new OBJ into the scene, apply your materials and Scale that object instead. You can hide your group, rather than deleting, in case you need to make changes.

    Post edited by L'Adair on
  • DekeDeke Posts: 1,631

    Exporting as one OBJ file is something I've never tried before. I'll give that a try. Thanks for the testing.

     

     

  • L'AdairL'Adair Posts: 9,479

    You're welcome.

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