GroupPro was made because default blender group instances are powerful, but it is not user friendly to work with. With GroupPro I managed to get rid of all annoying features of group instances:
- you can edit any instances on scene, not just the ‘source’ one
- you can work in recursive way – group instances, can be made of other subgroups, which can be made of subgroups etc. At any stage subgroup can be edited and saved, with all instances updated in realtime
- easy mirroring of selected groups, that fixes group instance mirror
- adjusting origin of group, without destroying positions of other instances placed in scene, or in another groups
- nice UI, that makes group instances easy to work with
This makes working with huge scenes with lots of objects easy and gives all the pros of group instances:
- less memory memory usage
- easy selection of multiple objects with one click
Here is video tutorial/demo how to use addon (for version 1.0):
https://vimeo.com/139789313
Update 1.01:
- preventing ability to edit linked library groups – editing linked library objects it is not supported by GroupPro,
- ‘flip’ options correctly stores groups assigned to mirrored objects,
- bounding box for edited group is now displayed only for visible objects and bbox is displayed now in xray mode to make it easily visible).
Update 1.02:
- Delete Group – deletes group with subgroups and objects that this group is made of permanently from blender file
- Make unique – Makes selected Group separate instance.
GroupPro – MakeUnique command - Convert to geometry – It splits Grouped object into separate, individual mesh objects.
- Initialize Groups – Helps to cleanup garbage objs. after pasting group from another file
Update 1.03
- Added pop-up menu with GroupPro commands under ‘Ctrl+X’ hotkey
Update 1.04
- fixed problems with displaying instances of group that was being edited
- fixed problems with ‘Set origin’ command
- added ‘Cleanup’ command – deletes unused groups with content. Unused groups = groups that are currently not being linked to scene). More info with example in manual.
Update 1.05
- refactored code for editing and closing groups (simpler, more speed)
- added ‘MaxDepth’ parameter for ‘MakingUnique’ groups- Maximum depth for which unique groups will be created. 0-inifinite depth, default=1 (use F6 panel to change maxDepth)
MakeUnique – maxDepth demo - bug fixes
And here is Yamato battleship I made to stress test new addon:
Blender addons 