Subtitles of the Movie

Grouping items together can be a great benefit in Combustion, especially when it comes to animating your objects. Instead of moving one item at a time, you can group things and than affect changes to them at the same time as well. Let's create a brand new Paint Operator so we can experiment with this. So I'm going to create a brand new Paint Operator and leaving everything at the defaults here. I have a Duration of ten frames and I'm going to say OK. What I'm going to do is simply draw a couple of rectangles out on the Viewport. So I'll just draw one here and one here and just a few like this. Now, what I could do if I wanted to animate these guys is I could, of course, put the Animate Button on and then move one at a time to wherever I want it to go. And that's one of the benefits to grouping. We can move things as one unit. So, for example, If I go ahead and click Drag outside of this group, I can grab everything and then go to the Object Menu and choose Group. Keep in mind, though, that before you group something, you want to make sure you grab absolutely everything inside the boundary. For example, if I click and drag like this and if you notice on the right, I don't have the boundary all the way on this box. So if I let go of the mouse, I only get everything that's enclosed completely. So I have to grab everything and make sure they're all inside the selection. Then I can Group and now I can click and drag them all. I can also rotate them and perform everything that I can do normally with my objects. So I can go to Transform and I can shear them, I can scale them all together, rotate, change their position and even better, I can color them all at the same exact time. But since this is Combustion, we still have the ability to access each element in this group one at a time and I can go to my Workspace, twirl down where it says Group and click on each rectangle individually and then change its parameters. The best part about this is that they still remain grouped so even after I change all the colors, I can click on any one of them to select the entire group and then they all move again. So as you can imagine, this can be very handy when you're animating something. So you might get the group to move across the screen or rotate in the animation but decide to change the color. So don't forget; just click on the individual object, change its shape, its size, its color, its rotation or whatever you want to do and you can still access the group at any time. To ungroup, just make sure you have the group selected, return to your Object Menu and choose Ungroup and then everybody is on their own again and you can move them around, change their pivot points and more because they are now all individual objects. You don't have to group everything, by the way. If you only want to make a group of two objects or three objects, just grab those guys and make a group from them. You could also Shift select things. So I can Shift Select these three and make a group. Don't forget; Object Ungroup to break them up like a rock band. And one day they will group again and go on tour. I know, that was corny, but it seemed to fit in this lesson very well.