Grouping multiple nodes and rearranging the nodes in a logical manner

- At the moment, all these mesh objects look like a great big mess, and, frankly, very hard to tell what's what. Our first goal is to make sense of all these different objects we are looking at here in our scene. Let's first back up. Okay. At the moment, all of the mesh objects are in the wireframe mode, and I would like to switch them to the shaded-mode, so that we can tell what's what a little bit easier.

To do that, we will hit nine on the num pad. Now, at the moment, we have several mesh objects present in our scene. Most of them are familiar to you from this course showcase. However, some of them are not so familiar. I'm referring to this very large tube we are looking at here at the moment, this very large object here. Actually, let's back up here a little bit more. Okay. This very large tube has a very specific role in this simulation.

However, we still do have some time before we'll need to use it. At the moment, it's hiding most of our scene mesh objects. For the time being, I would like to hide it. To do that, we can either use this icon on the left, here, or we can use the shortcut control, H to hide. Okay, now let's zoom in. Now we can tell we are looking at some very familiar mesh objects.

In the relationship editor window in the bottom right of our screen, we can see we have quite a bit of objects. Actually, if we'll zoom out here a bit, we can tell that we have actually got a huge amount of objects. For someone who is not familiar with this project, this can look a little bit intimidating. Even if you are familiar with this project, working with this large amount of objects is uncomfortable.

I know that most of the objects we are looking at in the relationship editor, most of these nodes are springs, and to avoid having so many nodes, we can group these nodes together. To group these nodes, we can either pick them one-by-one from the scene window, or we can select them from the nodes window. I find it easier to do it from the nodes window. Let's make some room here.

Let's see, let's scroll up. Here we got spring one, I'll mark it. I'll scroll down, all the way to the last spring. I'll shift-select the last spring, and now we can tell we have selected all of our springs, since the springs in the scene window are now highlighted in green, and the nodes are highlighted in the relationship editor as well.

We'll select either one of those in the nodes section, and we'll right-click, and select group. We'll close this group, and rename it to "Springs." Wonderful. First, we've already got a lot less nodes in the relationship editor, as well as in the nodes section. Let's zoom-in here in the relationship editor, and try to make sense of the different nodes.

Over here, we've got the springs. This one is the Z. That's Z. I'll try to rearrange the nodes in a way that will make sense to me. We'll put the springs on the bottom. This one is the P. Z, P. This one is the O, one. This one is O two.

That spells "zoop." Wonderful. This one is the canvas. We'll place it next to the springs. This one is the trampoline body. We'll place it up here. Over here we've got the bottom border, which is, again, a mesh object that has a very specific role in this simulation. However, at the moment, I would like to hide it because its role would come in a bit later.

Again, we'll hide this one. We'll hit control-H to hide it. We'll place it next to the trampoline body. This one is the top border, which is the mesh object we have hidden before, that large tube. This one is the O-rings. We'll place those next to the springs and to the canvas. Last, we've got the camera, which was imported with all the objects and we don't need it at all, so we'll delete it.

Wonderful. Now, our scene objects are more organized and we can easily understand what's what in our scene window, as well as in our relationship editor, and the nodes window. Keeping your relationship editor and nodes organized with meaningful names, and generally speaking, keeping a clean house, is a very important step on the road for a successful simulation.