Hey there! I’m using blender to build levels for some game projects. Had kind of a workflow question…
My setup uses Linked Duplicates to place scene objects. For example, if I have a bunch of trees, I might have one tree Mesh, and a hundred Tree.001 etc objects placed in the scene. My exporter will then only dump out one mesh and then the placements of the rest of them. Pretty standard…
The problem comes in if I need to use a modifier to adjust one of these meshes, after I’ve placed them. Most commonly, I want to apply a Split Edges, or sometimes a Subdivide. I want to Apply the modifier, so that it affects every instance. However, blender won’t let me Apply the modifier if there are Linked Duplicates.
If I duplicate the mesh I can apply it, but then the hundreds of other objects won’t get the updates. Any ideas about how to work around this?
Select your object and create new group. Add new group as group instance, for now on every modifiers affect to all group instance duplicates.
When you are freddy, select all group instancies and make duplicates real.
Select one of them, then >Shift+L > Object data. Alt+C > Mesh from curve…
Now they are still linked duplicates, modifiers applied and export.
Go for what he said. he probably has a better solution, i didnt see his post untill mine was already posted. if you go to the object data panel, there should be a number next to the objects name. if you click this number you will unlink the objects and you will be able to apply the modifiers, HOWEVER this also means that it would be the same as if you Shift Duplicated them in the first place.
i dont know if there is any work-around but this will at least let you use modifiers.
afterwards you could also select all of them and CTRL J to join them together so that if you add modifiers, it will apply to all of them.
if you dont wish to do that, keep in mind that you can also do CTRL L. this will let you copy an objects modifiers, materials etc on to all selected objects…
basically if you have 3 cubes, add a subsurface on one of them, select the two others, then select the third and CTRL L Modifier - then all 3 cubes will have a subsurface modifier on it.
Hmm, what JuhaW sort of worked… it applied the modifier to a few of the nodes but not all of them. I also seemed to end up with a few meshes with the same name. I’m not sure I understand what’s happening though, especially the Mesh From Curve bit…
But anyways, I figured out a much better workflow, so it’s not an issue. By modeling each object in its own scene, and then just using Linked imports, it works great, and if I need to use modifiers or something I can just load the model scene and change it there. That’s a better way to organize my scenes overall.
