Grouping and ungrouping objects

- [Instructor] This chapter is all about working with objects, and groups, and transformations. And I'm working in this file that you may well have access to but if you don't, it's no worries, you could work along with any suitable file of your own. So it's a little lonely house, and a street, and just to avoid some of the distractions of the background I'm going to turn those off. So I'm going to shoot over to the Layers Panel, just here nested with the Properties Panel and the Libraries and just drag across the visibility icons for the fence and the background, or click-drag across them to be more accurate.

Then I'll go back to my Properties Panel and what I'm going to do is use my temporary zoom by holding down Command-Spacebar, that would be Control-Spacebar on a PC. And just zoom in for your viewing comfort. So if I shoot into Outline Mode momentarily, Command-Y, or Control-Y, you can see that everything here is pretty much, apart from the chimney, a rectangle, like so. So essentially made from rectangles is a summary of this presentation.

I'll do Command-Y, or Control-Y, again to come out, and you'll see that all of the objects here, in the chimney and its stack, are individual, and I'd like to group those together. So I'm going to drag across them with my Selection Tool and I have a few different options to group them. I can right-click and choose Group, I can go to the Object Menu and choose Group, I can use the shortcut Command-G, or Control-G to group, and I can even use the Properties Panel's quick actions area to group them.

And I think I'll do that on this particular occasion. So now these will move around as one unit. And I'm just going to drop the chimney over here on the right hand side of the house. And what I'd like to do now is to group the chimney along with this house group. The house here is already a group so I'll select both of those things and then I'm going to group them. This time I'll use Command-G.

And the house group upsets priority and jumps to the front of the layer stack. It's going, "Hey look, I'm a group, "I'm at the front, there you go." So I need to send that back in the stacking order so I'm going to right-click on it this time and choose Arrange and Send To Back. And it's sent to the back of its layer. And once again we can see the house and all of its windows. The next change I'd like to make here is to the door, and I'd like to bring this down to maybe being two panels here then all of the small windows there.

What I don't really want to do is to un-group it and then work with it, and I'll show you why. If I click on the door and then un-group it, and from here I'm going to use the button Ungroup in the Properties Panel to do that. Several different ways you can do it, again, Shift Control-G, Shift Command-G, is the way I would normally do it to be fair. So that's un-grouped and then I want to select all of the window objects here. And I might be tempted to drag across them like so but what you're hopefully noticing here is I've got more than I bargained for.

Because I dragged across those objects and I also dragged across the house and the actual door itself. Now I could Shift-click the house and then Shift-click the door to work with these objects but there's still the potential for trouble. And there is an easier way for me to do that. And in the next movie you're going to find out exactly what that is.