Parenting and Layers

These techniques all focused on arranging my scene through parenting and layers. I had done a little of this before but sadly never really got to grips with it and I knew in the back of my mind that it was pretty easy. I guess I was pretty dopey in the first place to not have got it, anyway...

The concept of parenting objects involves grouping child nodes under parent nodes and baring in mind that all child nodes inherit parent node transformations. I opened up my outliner and shift selected all my scene's content and then grouped it. All the content is now grouped under a group node and is a child to the group. From this point on I created groups within groups and added other nodes to the group by clicking, dragging and dropping with the middle mouse button into other groups. In order to parent objects I selected them from the outliner and then held control and selected the columns group and pressed p on my keyboard.

Another way of organizing my scene is by using display layers. So I created an empty layer in the layer editor beneath the channel box and then double clicked on it to let me rename it and then saved the new name. From the outliner I selected the ground and the dome objects and added them to the new layer I just created. I am able to toggle the layers between being hidden, shown, normal, templated and referenced. When templated, layer objects are unelectable and displayed as dimmed wireframe. When referenced, the layer objects are unelectable, but displayed normally in the viewport.