Preserve mutual clone by uniquing more than one instance

[Peter M. Gruhn]

See attached image.

 

Filled auditorium with chairs. There was one chair over on the left that needed to have a leg to the ground. Uniqued it and extruded the leg until it disappeared into the floor. Happy fine

 

Now I have moved the camera and there is one more on the left and four on the right.

 

What I'm thinking it would be nice to do is :

 

- Select the four on the right (as is done).

- Hit the "make unique" button.

- Select one of the four.

- Edit it.

- Have the other three update to match.

 

This can't be done, as the make unique button is grayed out for a multiple selection.

 

Perhaps I am missing a "make this mesh an instance of that mesh" tool. That would solve the problem almost as elegantly.

 

I don't think this is the first time the "problem" drifted past me, but it is the first time is was this concrete rather than just messing about. Another scenario that it would be nice for:

 

One could array a number of instances of one geometry then select either by hand or with a random selecter script some of them. Make them a unique group of clones and do an edit. Do this a few times and one gets a desirable distribution of a small number of unique items without having to worry about interpenetration or holes in distribution etc. Might be nice.

[Dave Buchhofer]

Here's two that i use non-stop. I didn't write either one.

 

http://www.buchhofer.com/upload/files/Scripts/MakeUnique.ms

 

-- MakeUnique.ms

-- By Neil Blevins (soulburn@blur.com)

-- v 1.03

-- Created On: 10/04/00

 

http://www.buchhofer.com/upload/files/Scripts/MakeInstance.ms

 

Don't remember who made MakeInstance, but couldn't live without it

 

Also in the blurscripts package there is a SelectInstances that works wonderfully also.