Groups

Making a piece of the drawing a thing of its own, so nothing else sticks to it.

The problem it solves

Everything you draw joins onto everything else it touches. That is usually what you want - it is why a rectangle drawn against a wall shares that wall's edge, and why a face appears the moment a loop closes.

It is emphatically not what you want when you lay lettering onto the front of a cabinet. The letters land in the same flat plane as the cabinet door, so their edges join the door's edges: the hollow of an R becomes a hole in the door rather than a hole in the R, and rubbing the R out takes a piece of the door with it.

A group is the answer, and it is SketchUp's answer too: two pieces of geometry can be in the same place without being the same object. Geometry in a group does not join, split or stretch geometry outside it.

Making one

Pick what should be in it - a click, a double-click for a face and its edges, three clicks for everything joined on, or a box - and then any of:

Ctrl+G
/group
the right button, Make Group

A face taken into a group brings its edges with it, because a face here is what its edges enclose. A group you pick and group again goes in whole and stays a group inside the new one: a drawer is a group, and a chest of drawers is a group made of drawers.

Picking and moving

Click any part of a group and you have all of it, shown as a blue box round it rather than as every edge lit up. Move it and it goes as one piece; nothing loose that happens to touch it is stretched after it. Copy it - Ctrl with the move, or copy and paste - and the copy is a group of its own. Erase it and all of it goes.

Snapping still finds every point of a group from outside, so you can line something up with its corner without opening it. The group's crate - the box round it - is something to snap to as well: its corners, the middles of its edges, the centers of its sides and its center, the same points SketchUp puts grips on. A locked group shows its crate faintly all the time, since a locked group is what you draw against. You can draw on a group's face from outside, too: what you draw lies on it without joining it. What you cannot do from outside is push, pull, drill, offset or turn over one of its faces - for that you go in.

Working inside one

Double-click a group with the select tool, or pick it and use /edit, or the right button's Open Group. Everything outside it fades and is out of reach; a dotted box shows what you are inside; the bar says in "Group 1". What you draw now belongs to the group, and a group inside it is picked as a group of its own.

To come back out: Escape with nothing else pending, a click on nothing, /leave, or the right button's Close Group. From a group inside a group, that goes up one level at a time.

The groups panel

Down the right of the window, every group on the sheet as a tree - a group inside another sits under it, indented, and the arrow beside a group folds what is inside it away. It is SketchUp's Outliner.

Point at a row and the group shows its box in the drawing, so you can see which one it is before you do anything.
Click a row to pick the group, the same as clicking it in the drawing. A group inside another is picked from inside the one round it, which the program opens for you. Ctrl or Shift adds to what is picked.
Double-click a row to work inside the group.
Untick the box to put the group away; tick it to bring it back. Ctrl+Z undoes either.
Right-click a row for Pick It, Work Inside It, Rename..., Lock or Unlock, Put It Away or Bring It Back, and Explode. Rename puts /name and the old name on the command line - change it and press Enter.
The whole sheet, at the top, steps out of every group and picks nothing.

The open group is written in the accent color and says open; a locked one says locked; one put away, or inside one put away, is grayed. With the entity panel on as well, the groups take the lower part of the column. /groups turns the panel off and on, and so does Groups Panel on the drawing's right button.

Putting one away

A group put away is not drawn, picked or snapped to, and nothing is lost: it keeps everything and comes back as it was. Untick it in the panel, or pick it and /hide. /hide labels puts away every group with labels in its name - every radiant zone's labels at once - and /show brings back everything put away.

Naming

A new group is Group 1, Group 2 and so on. Pick it and /name Left knob calls it that; the entity panel shows the name and has a button for it. The name is what the bar and the messages use.

Locking

Pick a group and /lock, or the right button's Lock Group. A locked group can still be picked - it shows as a red box - and snapped to, but it cannot be moved, opened, changed, erased or grouped with anything until it is unlocked. That is what makes it safe to draw against: you cannot draw into it by accident, and moving something that touches it leaves it exactly where it was. /unlock, or the same menu row, undoes it.

Taking one apart

/explode, or the right button's Explode Group, lets the contents go back to being ordinary geometry - which then joins onto whatever it touches, the way it would have all along. A group inside an exploded group stays a group.

Groups a tool made

Some groups remember how they were made, and their right-click says so. Stairs offer Change the Stairs..., Print the Stringer Sheet... and Build the Stairs Again. A zone the radiant wizard built offers Open in the Radiant Wizard... and Print the Submittal Again.... A group a jig made offers Run the Jig Again.

In the file

Groups are saved with the drawing, and so is what a tool wrote into one - the radiant wizard's whole job, for one - every line of it, even in a copy of the program that does not know what it means. A file with groups in it still opens in an older build of the program; it simply arrives flattened, with nothing grouped.

Where this differs from SketchUp

SketchUp has two of these, a group and a component; a component is a definition with copies, so editing one fence post changes all forty. This program has the one. A copy of a group is a group of its own, and changing one changes only that one.