Problems about grouping make me kinda mad

[Patrizio_C]

Hi all, well seems we are not many people that has this problem about grouping. The situation kinda make me mad, I redid the import many time and still have random outcome and I can’t understand what I’m doing wrong. Now I will reproduce step by step what I did.
First collection is like the one of Mike:

So let’s say I want to parent the White Pieces to my Chessboard, do select first empty white pieces object, then select the board and CTRL+P and same with the Black Pieces, and look what I got in the pic …:

The mistery continue as I get upset and then right click on the White Pieces grayed out empty under the board and this is the result …

I did try to unparent and redo manytime the grouping and every time I get a different outcome and totally not like Mike so not sure what’s going on and what I possibly doing wrong. I did read the other post with similar problem but not found a solution in that post. Thank you for reading and helping.

*** UPDATED ***
More information about my testing, this time I choose to put on a video for show the real problem for me, take a look by yourself:
Video Bug Blender Linking
After I delete a linked object and undo some random times it suddenly appears under Chessboard … hope this is more helpfull

[FedPete]

Collections, do not work like folders under Windows or Mac.
It’s just a visual way to group items.

Using empty is also a way of grouping, but more on the parent-child relational way.
If you select a parent empty, all the children are affected.
What makes it confusing is that all objects of the empty, and the empty itself, can be placed in totally different collections.

But you don’t need to use an empty to group things like parent-child!

You can also have an object like your CHESSBOARD, with related children 1) “Chesh board” MESS, 2) empty “Black Pieces”, which has also children “Bishop black R”, …
And empty “White pieces” with no children.

The black children are greyed, because these are part of a different container. Not in container board!

The confusing starts, when you are using the two grouping mechanisms ‘Collenctions’ en ‘parent-child’.

[NP5]

Good way of describing it.

The empties are children of the board and in the board collection. But they have their own children that are in a different folder/collection the pieces folders. So the relationship is stored in the board collection but the mesh is stored in the pieces collection.

[Patrizio_C]

Thank you FedPete, I do understand in some way what you are saying but I yet not understand completely what happened to my example. I mean, I want to group all the white pieces parented with my white pieces empty object to my lovely board. At least I expected to see the same grayed objects under the grayed white pieces as you see in the last image, but that never happened, and with the black pieces as you can see I see only 3 pieces so that puzzle me a lot. I downloaded the project from Mike repository but it never look at all like mine so I not understand what I did wrongly.

[NP5]

Lesson 95 4:50 ish, Mikey changes to ‘Scenes’ layout for the outliner. It is in Layer View as standard. See if that is the difference. He was operating like you and saying things seem to be hidden but in fact, they were only showing the relationship not the objects as they had no icons to hide with not off at all.

I can’t think of a time I have changed that. But really it is not often one needs several layers of parenting or of objects that are not in the same collection.

Your images show as Layer View too. the little stack of images icon above the word Scene.

[Patrizio_C]

Yeah I check the video like 10 times, and I did check the Scene and Layer View too but not a big changes on the final outcome, infact I never understand how he select first the two collections then switch to layer view and selecting the board he get all selected. I can’t do that and not know why …

[Patrizio_C]

Ok so now I think I understand part of the trick but I think still it’s got bugged. First of all and very important seems that Mike hide the empty for Pawns and Black and White pieces,

then the next step is, right click on the White Pawns collection and select Select Object and then press M to move in a new collection called Pieces. After that on the Collection White Pieces you can finally unhide the Empty objects you hide before and still can select both pieces by hierarchy. Do the same with the Black Pieces and with the board. At the end the result will be a long list of pieces inside your collection but still some of them will appears only inside the parenting relationship of the Board object. Really strange and confusing in my opinion.

[NP5]

Just the way it works.

Collections connections are different to parenting connections.

Parenting only.

Parenting and Collections.

The parenting link of the empties is ‘grey’ as separated from the ‘object’ that I kept with the pieces that were parented to it.
Showing you there are non collection based relationships.

Perhaps you are overthinking this as a problem?

[Patrizio_C]

Maybe you are right, but as I can see in the second image you posted EmptySq link has 6 object instead of 8, while EmptyCone has the right number of 8. That’s could be not a problem but at least I expect to get the same object in a child list, maybe I overthinking too much because working on programming more then modelling make me focus more on this little details but at least you show me that same things happen to you too even with simpler example

[NP5]

Well spotted. Must be some glitch. Moving the empty moves them all including the two not showing the greyed relationship line.

Really weird. Saved and reopened, and one time the missing two changed, another try it went down to 3! And Cones to 5.

It makes no functional difference. But is odd in the outliner display. Must be some form of display glitch.

[FedPete]

Yes, I had the same (unlogical) visual Blender behavior. You get used to it.
That’s is why I said, collections are not like folders as I windows/Mac. They look like …

You can unparent objects!
Alt p for the child to break the relation.

[Patrizio_C]

Yes that was what I tried to exmplain and the same happen even with 2.9 but seems because I just tried it.

[Patrizio_C]

Yeah I made lot of practice in make and break parent relations in this two days but still I had to signal it as more then unlogical glitched troublesome for someone