Search in scene tree won't show groups

[mattjgerard]

Is there a way to have the search bar return groups?

Example, I have 6 tower lights that are all the same scattered throughout my scene, and each buried deep into the scene tree. Each tower light is named "TL50" and is a group of the objects that make up the light, none of which are names TL50. Just the group is named TL50.

I would like to move all these lights at the same time, and can do that if I drill down into the hundreds of layers into my scene tree for each one and carefully CTRL click on each one, then drill down more, CTRL click, crap, missed it, they all get deselcted, scroll to the top, start again.

Would love to just search for the TL50 groups and grab those, and use the move tool on them. But the search results don't return anything named TL50 since its a group, not an object.

Am I missing something or did I just find a  really legit item for the wishlist?

[Will Gibbons]

Good question. Not sure if there's a solution for that. Ideally, they'd be named the same thing and you can just collapse them in the scene tree and move them by shift+lmb to multi-select them. If they're all linked materials... right-click one of them in the Real-time view and choose 'select parts with material' and then move selection.

Does that help at all?

[mattjgerard]

A bit, if its something I know I'm going to be doing, I can make scene tree changes to make the grouping easier to work with, but most of the time 1) I'm not that good at planning ahead, 2) Clients come back with the goofiest changes I would never account for

So, yes, those tips can help a bit, thanks for those. I'll put in a request for the search engine to return groups as items that can be displayed in search results, that would be fantastic.

I did figure out that if there is one object in the Tower Light group that is unique to just those objects, I can search for that, it will return all the same parts in all 6 groups that I have, and it also displays the parent of that part, which is usually the main group I'm trying to grab, so I can CTRL click and select the parent group and then move them all.

Its another one of those workflow things that would be great to work into development, but by no means necessary.