I [heart] the Outliner

I look at a lot of models in the 3d warehouse, and download and view many of the full house models, particularly when they include interiors.

One thing that I'm repeatedly amazed by are complex models (as full houses always are) that are completely flat model structures, meaning a series of components surrounded by lines and faces with no groups or model specific components.

A friend of mine ran a marathon in four hours, and had a chance to mingle with the other runners. He said to the 1st place finisher, "I have no idea how you can run 26 miles in under two hours." And the winning runner said back to him, "I have no idea how you can continue to run for four hours straight."

This is what I think of when I see these models with no groups. I have no idea how anyone creates a full house (or any complex model) WITHOUT heavy use of grouping and then organizing those groups with the Outliner, while maintaining their sanity.

In my opinion, using the Outliner is critical, allowing you to break a large model into a series of smaller models, as shown in the image. It also allows you to make better use of components and as always, using good quality names for the objects in your model will help enormously.

For a great introduction to using the Outliner, please view Aidan Chopra's video on youtube, "Putting it all together, after the jump.

In my next tips and tricks post I will talk about using groups in conjunction with layers.