"Group" is used to create a group of objects from several unrelated objects for selection and manipulation purposes. If you select two or more objects and use "Group", a new "Group" object is created, with the selected objects as its children. From then on, the objects acts a single group for selection and manipulation. You can use "Ungroup" to ungroup them later on.
Figure 5: Creating a group hierarchy in Ez3d. The cone and cylinder are grouped together, so are the sphere and cube. The two groups are again grouped.
The newly created "Group" object can only be moved and re-sized. You cannot perform any modeling operations on it. If you click on any object in the group, the entire group will be selected. To select an individual sub-object, use "Scene - Object List".
Grouping objects can be particularly useful under the following circumstances:
a. When you want to organize your objects in a cohesive structure (similar to organizing files on your computer disk!). Use "Scene - Object List" to view the hierarchy.
b. When you want to move a group of objects together as though it were one whole object. (Note: You can also move two ungrouped objects together by selecting both of them and manipulating one of the objects. However, this operation does not preserve the connection between the two objects).
c. When you want to assign the same attribute (such as color or display style) to all objects in the group. (Note: Again, you can do this in a non-permanent fashion by selecting more than one object and changing the color, and so on).
If you "Cut" the "Group" object, all objects that belong to the group will be removed.
Note: You cannot apply a texture map to a grouped object. You will need to ungroup the objects (or select using "Scene - Object List") and apply texture maps on each object individually.
