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Ctrl+G should be bound to Move to Collection > New Collection, not Create New Collection

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#1

Right now, CtrlG is bound to Create New Collection (collection.create). This is an extremely useless and confusing shortcut, because its only apparent effect is that this appears in the bottom left corner:

And if you look a bit closer, the selected object receives a second user data-block:

But the outliner doesn’t change because Create New Collection does not actually group the selected items into a collection in the scene collection. It does add these extra collections to the Blender File mode of the outliner, but that is hard to find and rarely useful:

In Photoshop, on the other hand, CtrlG actually groups the selected layers into a group/collection:

In Blender, you have to use the hotkey M and then click New Collection:

But this can be bound to CtrlG:

And the default, useless action (Create New Collection) unbound:

This new keybinding works in the 3D Viewport, but doesn’t work in the Outliner for some reason (the M menu also is missing the shortcut:

In Conclusion

This bug where the New Collection operator has incompatible shortcuts between the 3D Viewport and Outliner should be fixed, and the CtrlG keyboard shortcut default binding should be changed to New Collection so it behaves just like users of modern digital content creation software have come to expect for grouping selected layers into a group (or with Blender’s terminology, grouping selected objects into a collection). M is useful for moving the selection into a particular existing group/collection, but it takes an extra click to actually make that new group/collection. The existing binding for CtrlG is very confusing and doesn’t seem to be useful. Users will just assume it is broken because it has no obvious effect.

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GSoC 2020: Outliner Discussion and Suggestions
#2

@natecraddock I know your GSoC is nearly over by now, but perhaps you have some expertise in the subject and might be able to comment or shed some light on this, particularly in regards to the bug mentioned above.

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#3

Ctrl + G should be to group objects in an empty. There’s not better thing than this.

I don’t get the panic around this…

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#4

I haven’t done anything with Collection management from the 3D view, but I agree that these shortcuts could be improved on. It appears the old grouping ideas are still here in the keymap.

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#5

I’m a bit confused, both on the official blender 2.80, and on the last 2.81 build ctrl + G starts a “create new collection” popup but nothing happens
the new collection is not created in the outliner, nor does it create a new collection with the selected objects …
am i doing something wrong ?? :thinking:

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#6

“Ctrl+G create a collection not linked to any scene, similar to groups in 2.7”

https://developer.blender.org/T64562

#7

I tried blender 2.80 in factory reset …
if I press ctrl + G it comes out the popup with an editable name but nothing happens literally, it’s a bug ???
to create a new collection I have to press m and “create a new collection”
:thinking:

anyway … re-give me ctrl + G to create Groups. :pray:

edit:

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ok i investigated better …
but what is the purpose of this ???
replace Groups with hidden collections ???
it’s very confusing …
What should I do with collections that are not visible in the scene?
someone explains to me the use of this, especially in this way ??

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#8

This new collection is not visible in Outliner since it is not linked to the “Scene Collection”.

What should I do with collections that are not visible in the scene?

For example, Add > Collection Instance
or you can select this collection in the Limit to Collection fileds for physics.

#9

Yes I understand…
but using the shortcut ctr + G to do this is very confusing, people expect to create groups with this shortcut …
I hope @ThinkingPolygons 's suggestion is taken into account, at least having an empty with a group of objects in the scene is much clearer.

Currently the question of layers, collections and groups is very confusing and gives the impression of an incomplete work …
Despite having the advantages of the collections rename, and infinite possible levels, to a practical approach, when you are dealing with a large amount of objects to organize the old system was much more efficient, because it gave you immediate visual feedback of what was happening … Even if you opened the scene after a few years, the layers they gave you a panoramic veil …
In this he is right @1D_Inc , which made clear with his schematic pdfs the very experience of it.

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#10

As can be gleaned from this confusing discussion, the current feature of creating an invisible collection is a very, very bad UX. It should be fixed to do what people expect, like they are used to in other applications like Photoshop. No amount of technical justification excuses the confusion that this causes, so it is fundamentally a flawed design until it behaves in a manner consistent with everyday expectations.

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#11

I agree it’s very confusing, but I think the idea of imitating the group’s behavior as in 2.79 where groups are also not visible in Outliner. But although they are green in the viewport.

A good solution is to return the group highlighting with the color in the viewport, but do it as a property of each collection. This way you can highlight some collections with the color in the viewport (as groups of 2.79 are green).

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#12

Correct me if I am wrong, but weren’t groups entirely removed from Blender 2.8? Which means the grouping thing (where the outline turned green in 2.7) isn’t relevant anymore. Instead, the Outliner has been turned into something more useful and familiar: essentially the layer stack in Photoshop or Illustrator or Gimp or any other layer-based software. Ctrl + G groups selected items together into a parent container.

I don’t care what Blender calls it. “Collections” instead of “layers”, “collections” instead of “groups”, that is all entirely unimportant. It’s the concept, not the name that matters to people. People are used to the concept of a layer stack, and they are used to the concept of hitting Ctrl + G to group selected layers into a container. Use whatever terminology you want under the hood, but it is the concepts that matter and those are currently broken. Fundamentally broken design.

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#13

I think it is not quite correct to refer to Photoshop. In Blender one object can be in multiple collections at the same time, hence all the difficulties. That’s why there are different actions “move in” and “link to”.

I mean, it’s not groups or layers (as we’re used to in Photoshop), it’s collections.

#14

Move to Collection > new collection is already works with M.
Ctrl+G should be left to Common groups, when they will appear, on my mind.

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#15

You are right that Photoshop’s layer stack is simpler than Blender’s layer stack, because of reasons like the one you mentioned with layers belonging to multiple collections. But it is still a layer stack. It is still a concept people are familiar with from Photoshop et al. There are certain design patterns used in layer stacks that people become familiar with and those need to be consistent in order to be properly designed. Deviating from standards just because Blender’s layer stack is more complicated is a very bad reason to justify making the software intentionally more confusing. If it is actually useful to create an invisible collection, then another shortcut that is more obscure could be assigned to that, and hopefully the UX can be improved to clarify that some action did actually occur. But standard keymaps need to be consistent for analogous actions (grouping) in analogous concepts (layer stacks). Otherwise, confusion ensues, and that is not the fault of the user. That is 100% the fault of the designer. And users are 100% right to report it as a bug, because it literally is a bug— the software is behaving incorrectly (adding a group but not actually adding a group) even if it’s behaving as intended by the implementers, because the intentions are wrong. That is a bug. The user is always right.

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#16

Agreed with Keavon 100%. I’m just moving now to 2.82 from 2.79b, where new Groups ‘do’ show up in the Outliner, and I found 2.82’s Ctrl-G behaviour to be very confusing (and I still do; I don’t see the value in Outliner-invisible Collections). Implementing Keavon’s keybinding suggestion fixed the issue for me, and honestly should just be the app’s default behaviour.

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#17

I agree 100% with @Keavon. :+1:
I couldn’t have explained this frustration, this contrariety better than he did.

#18

@billrey Would you please take a look at this UX issue and see if a fix can be implemented? (It’s as easy as remapping the default key binding.)

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#19

Also seems confusing finding/filtering these newly created collections that are not part of a Scene and then moving them into an existing scene. The easiest way that I could find to filter them was to view orphaned data, but then you don’t have any options to move into a scene.

#20

Hi @Harleya, I am wondering if you could take a look at this thread because I believe you are on the UI/UX team (or if I’m wrongly assuming, sorry!) and it looks like @billrey never saw comment that tagged him. Over the past year more people have continued lunging forward to support this because it’s such a common sense thing to fix. Implementation-wise, it is also immensely simple: just changing a default keybinding. Would you mind reading the original post (and potentially some comments if you still need convincing for some reason) and posting your thoughts? This is one of those silly things, “UX antipatterns”, that Blender has a bad reputation for, even though it’s been making amazing progress fixing them throughout the 2.8 series. Landing this keymap change for 2.83 would be super helpful, especially because it will be an LTS release.

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