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Comment by jbmorgado | Hacker News Reader

For the sake of me, after trying for hours I still couldn't understand how to do something as simple as put 2 cubes in a group and move them or resize them together in Blender and keep their dimensions with numbers that made the minimum sense while maintaining the 2 as different objects (i.e for texturing purposes).

Seriously, it's just that non intuitive. In the beginning I thought it was perhaps because I was used to C4D, but after that episode, I realised some things in blender simple don't make sense for someone that thinks in objects the mathematical way.

On a side note, I started 3D with POV-Ray many years ago, and, although not having a UI, at least the text description of the scenes was perfectly intuitive... I just can't reach that point with Blender.

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Sounds like just typical struggle with learning terms from a new software. You're looking for Parenting in blender it sounds like, much like the grouping you're talking about.

How to do what you wanted:

Shift-A Cube Shift-A Cube G to move second cube(assuming you don't want them stacked) Shift right click to select other cube Ctrl+P select Object to parent one to the other(you would use Keep Transform if you wanted to keep them together but move/scale/rotate separate)

Look in the Scene graph on the right, they're still separate objects so you can assign different materials to their faces, unwrap, un-parent them with Alt+P, whatever.

If you wanted to merge the geometry, you'd use Ctrl+J to join them.

Part of the confusion might be that a “group” in Blender is not like in other applications, and should probably have been called something else—a “grouped selection”, say.

In Blender terms, you probably wanted to create a “parent” (typically an empty) for your objects.

The last really intuitive, approachable GUI, I think, was in trueSpace 3D (the "classic" interface that went back to Caligari on the Amiga; they added an awkward "just like the other guys" interface to later versions, and the gratis abandonware version only has that awkward interface). It's really a pity they couldn't keep up with the materials and render engines when it mattered; by the time they caught up with everyone else, the product's reputation as something that had gone from amazing (on relatively primitive machines) to "just a toy" was pretty much sealed, and there was no way back into the game.

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