Grouping objects - SketchUp Tutorial

- [Instructor] It always helps to stay organized when you work in SketchUp. And one way to do this very easily is to group objects. So here I have basically two appliances in the scene, but I haven't done any grouping on these. So let's say I wanted to move the refrigerator. Well, in order to do that, I can't just select one of these faces. I would have to box select everything and then hit my move key, and then I can actually move that. But let's say this is in a tight space and I wanted to move it just slightly. Well, it might be hard to select everything. And this is where grouping comes in very handy. What we can do is we can select a lot of components or objects and then group them so that they all select as one object. So I'm just going to go ahead and again, box select this entire object here. And then right click and do Make Group. Now what that does is it collects everything that I've selected and it creates what's called a group. And now I can click on that group and I can move everything as one. Now if I want to further edit this object, I can certainly do that. All I have to do is double click on the group, notice how it expands to that dotted line. And now I can get into all the individual components of that group. Now once I've finished editing, all I have to do is click off of that and it returns to being a group. Now groups can go a little bit further and you can create what are called hierarchies, and that's groups within groups and that can help you further organize your scenes. So I'm going to select this refrigerator and just hit Delete. And let's go ahead and focus in on the dishwasher. Now again, this is very much the same. I have nothing grouped here. And so let's go ahead and be a little bit more strategic with how we group things. So I'm going to go ahead and select the base of this dishwasher or the main body of this dishwasher. And I'm just going to select one of these faces, right click and go Select, All Connected. Now what this does is it selects anything that's connected to that one face I selected. And in this case, it will select the body of that dishwasher. Now that we have it all selected, we can just group it. So right click, Make Group. Now we can do that again for the door of the dishwasher. We can Select, All Connected, right click, Make Group. Or if we want, we can select the handle. And again, I can always use box select. I don't have to do All Connected and do a Make Group. So now I have three groups. I have the body of my dishwasher, the door, and the handle. But let's say we wanted to open the door. Well, the handle would always move with the door. So let's go ahead and arrange it so that the handle is on the door and we can group those together. So I'm going to go ahead and select move. Just click on that corner of the handle and snap it to the face of the dishwasher. And then I'm going to Shift + Select the door and the handle and then right click, Make Group. So now I have a group that's the door and the handle. Now I can double click on this and select just the handle group or the door group, or click off of it and select both. So let's go ahead and connect this to the main dishwasher. I'm going to go ahead and hit move, snap that to the corner. And now select the base of the dishwasher as well as the door and the handle, and then let's group it all together. So what I have now is I have a group that's the dishwasher and I can move my dishwasher. But let's say I wanted to open the door of the dishwasher. Well, all I have to do is double click and then I can select that subgroup and use my rotate tool. So I'm going to hit Q and then rotate this along the red axis and I can open the door of my dishwasher. And you can see now I have a dishwasher with the door open. And if I want to, I could obviously reverse that to close the door. So grouping is a great way to stay organized in SketchUp. You can group large collections of objects, faces, edges, or groups themselves to keep yourself organized.