Need help structuring my item types

[tomgoodell]

I have animals that show up in various parts of my story. I would like to be able to have a track in my Subway View that shows all animals, as well as tracks for specific animals. The only way I can find to do that is to make a Character named, e.g., The Fox, and another Character named Animals, and include both of those characters in subway views when I want to see where they show up.

I’d also like to be able to filter on both all Animals as well as specific Animals.

It seems to me that this would lend itself to some kind of nest structure (specific animals being children of all animals) but I can’t find a way to do that that allows me to display their tracks and to filter on them.

If anyone has any insight into the best approach I would much appreciate your comments.

[AeonRob (Rob Steep)]

You’re right that nesting is an ideal way to organize your characters into groups and to be able to filter by the whole group.

You can achieve this in a couple of ways, but either way, the first step is to add the individual animals to a character group. Does the template you’re using have Character Groups as an Item Type? If not, we can show you how to create it separately.

Assuming that you have character groups available, the first step is to create a new group and add your characters to it:

1. Click the Character icon in the sidebar to open the Character panel.
2. Click the down arrow next to New Character and select Character Group.
3. Enter a name for the group and hit enter.
4. Drag each character onto the group to add them.

Now, depending on what you’re trying to achieve, you have a couple of options:

• Opt.1: Show tracks for only the individual animals, using filtering to show who’s part of the Animals group.
• Opt.2: Show a track for each animal, and the Animals group.

Opt.1

If you’re simply trying to see only the events that involved members of the Animals group, filtering may be the easiest way to accomplish this.

Starting with the Animals character group with members added:

1. Assign each character to the events they’re involved in.
2. In the Subway view, click to open the Choose Tracks menu.
3. Check the box for Character (leave Character Group unchecked). You should now have tracks showing for each character.
4. Now we are going to filter to only show events that are related to members of the Animals group. In the sidebar, click the Characters icon to open the Characters panel.
5. If your panel has them shown, click the numbered box next to the Animals character group to filter the view. Otherwise, hover over the Animals group, click the pencil icon, and select Filter.

The subway will now show only events related to characters who are part of the Animals group.

Opt.2

This is if you specifically want to see a track for the Animals group in addition to the individual characters. This will show a track for Animals in Subway view, but it does require assigning events to both the Animal group and the group member involved.

1. Open Settings from the cog icon at the top right of the window.

2. Go to the Item Types tab.

3. Select Character Group from the lefthand list and then check the Show In > Relationship Comparisons setting. This will make it so Character Groups can be shown as tracks in Subway view.
   

   

4. For each event involving one of the group members, use the Relationships panel in the inspector to also assign the Animals group.

5. Use the Choose Tracks menu to show/hide character groups in the Subway view.

Hope that helps!

[tomgoodell]

@AeonRob Thank you so much for that thoughtful and very clear explanation! I would never have figured those options out on my own, and I learned a couple new features that will be really helpful—especially being able to click on the number next to a Character in the Characters panel to filter on them.

Option 2 is what I need, and now I have that working for me. It seems like in Option 2 the only benefit of having the Animals group is to be able to visually see in the Characters Panel which Characters belong to it. It doesn’t provide any functionality beyond that. The same functionality could be achieved simply by making Animals another Character and assigning it to the same Events to which I assign specific animals. It would be great, as a future enhancement, to have the nested groups have the filtering functionality without having to manually include them for each event.

Many thanks again for your help!