Hey guys, I'm Aaron. Today I want to look at a question that has come up a lot.
Several people have asked about this. That is, we know we have the Tag Folders, but
why are Tag Folders different from what is in Outliner already. When should you use
them and that sort of thing? Let's take a look at just a couple of examples of where Tagged Folders
and Outliners would be preferable one over the other. Let's hop in. For this example, I have a
building. A little house on some land. We'll start by looking at what is already in here. We're not
really going to manipulate or change what's in here so much as walk through the structure and see
what we have and how we use it. Over here in tags, everything is in a folder; in a tag which is in a
folder. Here I have a folder for the first floor, for the foundation, landscape, plants, and second
floor. So, I can turn one of these off and the whole second floor will disappear.
If I drop this down, I can work through here and turn off the roof, the walls,
entourage [etc.]. I could actually work my way through here and this is one way to use Tag
Folders. Now, because everyone does what they do in different ways, everyone has different methods
for how they want to break their buildings up, I'm not saying this is the only way to do it.
This is a way to organize your building or your model - move it into large chunks and in those
large chunks, those smaller pieces. The individual groups and components, then, will sit inside of a
tag inside of a Tag Folder. This is how I chose to set this up. You can see each of these sections
has different pieces so I can actually turn pieces on and off one piece at a time,
or I can turn the whole thing off by toggling the folder. That is an option, and that is the idea
of how one would go about using Tag Folders. Separate from Tag Folders is Outliner. I have
long told you guys that Outliner is awesome and that you should use it. I'm not going to go into
how to use Outliner here so much as see the difference in the data that you would want to
maintain with Outliner versus Tag Folders. Just to dive in, I have this fence which is a bunch
of components. This panel repeats over and over again. I'm going to grab one of them. You can see
it highlights right here. You can see inside that wood fence, I have a bunch of components; columns,
rails, and a group of pickets with a bunch of picket components inside of it. If I drill in
here quickly and double-click one, you can see inside of this I have all of these other pieces.
This is how Outliner is supposed to work. This lets me drill down into nested data to organize or
navigate my model. It is similar to Tag Folders in that I can nest things deeper. What you probably
don't want to do is to take each of these things, put them into a tag, put them into separate tags,
and then put those onto separate tags. I wouldn't want to have a fence panel tag and then inside
that fence panel tag have a rails tag and a separate pickets tag, it is a lot more work
because, generally speaking, tags is here to set line styles, or to toggle visibility.
So, with this fence, all I want to see with my use is coming here to landscape and turning my
fence on and off. Having all of that in the same tag means I can quickly do that.
For organizational purposes, for working inside of the model, I put all of the pieces inside of
one piece here so I can actually drill in, then, and work on an individual piece there.
That happens automatically with Outliner. I don't have to go in and create a bunch of tags.
So, therein lies the big difference between using Outliner and using Tags.
Tags is a manual thing to set up to control visibility as you work through your modedl;
whereas Outliner is an automatic way to navigate the pieces that make up your model. Yes,
you could go through and create tags that correspond with every single piece,
but it would be rough. It would not probably be something you would want to do.
Plus, when I add things like repeating components like this, each component is its own entity over
here inside of Outliner. You can see here I have a whole bunch of these wood components, wood fence
components, and each of them is its own thing. I wouldn't want to create Wood Fence Component 1,
Wood Fence Component 2. I wouldn't want to create each one of them in a tag. I would spend my whole
day making tags if I did that. Therein, that is the difference. The big piece is creating
tags and creating Tag Folders to help organization of view, or to assign line types and use Outliner
to navigate nested data, nested components, that's the pieces inside of your model, automatically.
There are probably more ways you could go about using those pieces. You could actually hop in
there and come up with other situations or ways to organize your tags. People have come up with
great ways to use Outliner that works for them. I'm not saying, "don't do that." I'm not saying,
"you have to do it this way." But that was an example of the difference between Tag
Folders and Outliners. Really, the best thing is to use both of them. They are not mutually
exclusive. You can actually use them both side by side. If you liked that, go ahead and click
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