Worldcraft offers two ways of keeping track of items in your level: normal grouping and visibility grouping (VisGroups).
Grouping
Normal grouping is used to literally "glue" things together.
The object shown above is made of eight brushes. If you were to click on a single piece when the object is ungrouped, only that piece would be selected, and you'd have to ctrl-click each piece to select the whole thing (or drag a selection box over the whole thing). When the object is grouped however, clicking on any individual piece while select everything in the group.
• brushes do not need to touch in order to be grouped together
• groups may contain any combination of brushes and entities
• you can work on an individual piece of a group of objects by enabling the ignore groups option
• grouped objects can be combined with VisGroups (see below)
VisGroups
VisGroups are somewhat like normal groupings in that they make managing groups of objects easy. VisGroups do this in an entirely different way though. Let's say you have the following section in your map:
Now, let's say you want to be able to make the furniture a group, but you still want to move each piece around independently from the other. This is precisely what VisGroups are good for.
First, select the furniture pieces, then click on the hide selected objects button. This will do two things: hide the objects in the 2D and 3D views, and create a new VisGroup with the selected objects.
The new VisGroup will appear in the Filter Control dialog named after the number of objects it contains. To change this to something more suitable, select the VisGroup, then click on it again. You will be able to change the name to whatever you like. As well, you can click to the left of the name and a hand will appear next to the VisGroup. This is how you set which VisGroups are visible and which are not. You must press the Apply button for the changes to take effect.
Some things you can do with the mouse in the Filter Control dialog:
• drag one group onto another group (this will cause the first group to be merged with the second group, and the resulting group will keep the name of the second)
• drag a group out of the Filter Control dialog (this will allow you to delete VisGroupings)
If you make the furniture group visible, then select it and press the Mark button, the group will be highlighted in the 2D and 3D views.
The other two options available to you are Purge and Edit. Pressing the Purge button will remove any VisGroups from the Filter Control dialog that do not actually contain any objects (which is possible if you have deleted objects or made one VisGroup part of another.
The Edit button brings up the Object Groups dialog.
This dialog allows you to change the name and color of existing VisGroups, or delete them. Deleting the VisGroup does not actually delete the group's objects, it just take's away the VisGrouping from them, making them individual unlinked objects. You also have the option of creating new (empty) VisGroups with the New group button.
The last way you can use VisGroups is through an object's properties, in the VisGroup tab.
The above dialog will also be a part of an entity's Properties dialog. To assign the object to a VisGroup, just select the appropriate group. To remove the VisGrouping from this object, click on (no group).
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