Replace groups with components - Settings and Efficiencies

- [Instructor] Sometimes we create or download a model that has repeating elements that are made up of groups but not components. This sofa for example is a great looking model, but the repeating elements are not connected. If I double click into this sofa cushion and change the material. It would be nice if all of the cushions changed along with this one. This would be the case if they were created as components before the copies were made. So to fix this, instead of deleting these cushions and starting over with a new array of components, we're going to create one component and switch out the remaining cushions in place with the newly created and connected component. We'll be using the Components window and the Replace Selected function. First I'll select a cushion and make it into a component. This one's going to be our main repeating element so I'll right-click, choose Make Component, and I'm going to name it SeatCushion. Click Create and it's added to our Components list. Now for the Replace Selected function to work we need to create these as components as well. So I'll right click on each of them and choose Make Component. These are going to get scrapped later so I'm just going to call it one. Right click Make Component, make it number two. And the third one, Make Component, three. You can see those being added to the list, but we're going to clean this list up later. So, to replace it, we're going to select our first cushion that we'd like to replace with our newly connected and created component over here. So I've selected it. I'm going to scroll down the list and choose seat cushion, right click and choose Replace Selected. Now these two are connected. I'll go ahead and do the same thing for the last two, but I can hold down the shift key with my select tool to select both of them at the same time and right click on seat cushion and choose Replace Selected. Let's practice the same thing on the back cushions. For this one, this is going to be my repeating element so I will right click, choose Make Component. I'm going to call it BackCushion. Create. And again, I'm going to create these as components, but it's not going to matter what they're called so I'll just continue along with my numbering. Five, create, right click, make component, lastly six, create. And again, you can see these added to the list, but this is going to be our main element here, BackCushion. So I can select the remaining three, holding down my Shift key to select all three of those back cushions. Right click and choose Replace Selected. Now it looks pretty much the same because we haven't changed anything about the first one or any of them really. So I'll go ahead and double click into this component and apply a material. And now we can see that they are in fact all connected. So let's go ahead and clean up the rest of this model. I'm going to double click into the main part of the sofa and paint it the same texture. And that's looking good. Now to clean up our list we need to select the arrow icon here and choose Purge Unused. And now we have only the components that are being used in the model. So now this is a more efficient model. When I make a change to one cushion they will all change and same with the back cushions. So this method would apply to anything that has repeating elements that should have been created as components, but were created as groups before the copies were made. So just stairs, beams, windows, and so on. Anything with a repeating element. So hopefully this will make your process of modeling with components more efficient.

Efficiencies