Modifying a Group

[tmccarter]

Hi everyone,

 

I'm building a residential neighborhood with several apartment buildings. I have two different building models that will be used two or three times each. Some of the buildings will be mirrored images of the ones across the street from them. Here's my question/issue: I want to create mirrored versions of the buildings, and I'd love to just use the mirror modifier and offset it. So I select an entire apartment building (and all of its nested groups, objects etc.) and group them into one big gruop (i.e. "Building_01"). Then I select the group I just made, and go to the modify panel. When I choose "Mirror" it applies the modifier to each little object within my group (and there are hundreds of them). Yikes! Well, my question to you guys is: can I apply a modifier to a group? I like the mirror modifier because I can make changes to an object, and its clones update accordingly. It works beautifully with a single object (like a loft for the curb/sidewalk) but it definitely doesn't work the same on a group (like my big ol' apartment complex). Any suggestions? Is there a better way to do what I'm trying to do?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

-Tim

[Tim Saunders]

If it is a project you plan on updating over and over again, I would just suggest modeling the buildings in a different scene and xref them into the neighborhood scene.

[kdavenport]

Tim,

 

The problem with applying a modifier to a group is that the modifier is instanced to each object in the group just like you selected all of them seperately and applied the modifier

 

I would perhaps try just using the mirror tool rather than the modifier. It does the same thing as the modifier, you can tell it to make an instance or a reference for ease of modeling and you can place that instance whereever you want rather than be restricted to where the mirror modifier places it. Also, I think not having all those modifiers will decrease the amount of system resources you'll need to use.

 

Hope it was helpful!

[tmccarter]

Thanks for the reply, Kevin. Unfortunately, I have tried the Mirror tool and it turns all my booleans, extrudes, and lofts inside-out. I could convert it all to editable mesh, but I want to be able to make easy changes to the objects in the future. Is there anything I can do?

 

Thanks again,

 

-Tim

[kdavenport]

It's really strange that your objects would turn inside out like that. If that is the case, then I would recommend what Tim recommened before, saving your building as it's own file and then XRef-ing it into the scene. That way, anything that you do (i.e. mirroring) will only affect the XRef and you can edit the building whenever you want.

[tmccarter]

Thanks for the replies, guys. Tim: Thanks for the tip. That's how I'll do it, with xref scene option using dummies to position the individual buildings. That way my overall neighborhood scene will update automatically when I make changes to the source buildings. Kevin: Is there a way to mirror an xref'd scene? It seems like any modifiers I apply to the dummies don't affect the scene. The Mirror tool doesn't seem to do the trick either.

 

Thanks again,

 

-Tim