Hey, guys. This is Aaron. Some of the questions we get a lot of are pertaining
to groups and components. Things like, "what is the difference between a group and a component?"
or "when should I use one over the other?" I have a couple of examples here that I want
to show you - the difference between groups and components. We will start by creating them. So,
groups and components are both containers. That is to say, they isolate geometry from
other geometry. So if I was to triple-click on this "G" right here and - just, as it is,
move it to overlap the "R," - when I try to move it back, as you can see, it is going to get stuck.
That geometry merged with the "R" as soon as I moved it. If I right-click and say "Make Group,"
Now if I move it over the "R," I can move it back because the container isolates that geometry. So,
groups are great ways to take a group of geometry, or a bunch of geometry and combine it together and
isolate it from everything else. If I right-click on the selected geometry and I say "make
component," its going to come up and actually prompt me for some information. It's going to
ask me for a definition, a description, this is the name and just basic information that you need
to reference what is this group - or what is this component. Gluing - I have an option to make it
automatically glue to other surfaces or always face camera. A bunch of options in here that I
can put in that go along with the component. Unlike a group, which is just the container,
components inherit a little bit of information right from the beginning as well. Alright,
so that's creating a group versus a component, so what about actually using them? How are they
different? If we buzz over here to this cabinet, I have two stacks of bowls. Over here on the left,
if I pick one, it come up and it tells me it is a group. It also tells me that there are
five identical groups in this model. And that is these five bowls stacked here. On the right side,
if I pick one, it tells me it is a component. Again, five of these in the model. Right here. So,
this is a functional difference between groups and components. If I double-click into this group,
and - I'm going to pull up my paint bucket and - I'm going to paint this bowl blue. We see that
that bowl turned blue. If I exit out of here, we can see that the rest of the bowls did not. Groups
just isolate geometry. Again, there is nothing linking one of these groups to another group.
Over here in components on the other hand, if I double-click into one of these components - and
I'm going to color this red - they all turn red. Components reference each other. So if one copy
of a component that is edited, all instances in that component are changed. Another thing that
happens that is really nice is this component browser window. So I have this - this is my
components window. Any component I save in the model shows up in this list. So, even if I was
to do something like - say I was to delete all of these red bowls out of here - they're all
gone. There are no more in the model anywhere, but I can come into the component browser,
grab this bowl and bring it right back into the model. I can do that with any component,
even if there's not a copy in there. If I take this blue bowl and delete it, that blue bowl
is gone forever. I would have to recreate it to bring it back into my model. So that is the basic
functionality of components. Another question we get a lot of is, "what about file size?' "What
impact does group versus components have on file size?" Here I have an example of two models. So,
this one on the left has 100 copies of this little chess piece. All saved as groups. On
the right side, I have 100 copies of the exact same geometry, but saved as components. So,
if I look at the statistics for these files, you can see my 100 groups is just under 400K,
whereas my components is 268K. So significantly smaller by using components. That's because
there is actually one instance of this geometry saved and then it is just repeated throughout the
model. Whereas over here, every single line, every single face is recreated to make this model. So,
that's a quick look at using groups and components in SketchUp. Thank you.