7

I am building a tenement. After I have built one course of bricks I want to duplicate them to form an adjacent course, but with a negative scale, in the X axis. When a story has been completed I want to duplicate this collection of courses and bricks, to create several stories.

I thought that parenting the first course of bricks to an empty would let me do this but it doesn’t.

How can I do it?

Inkbug
  • 377
  • 1
  • 3
  • 15
Stephen
  • 295
  • 3
  • 8

1 Answers1

7

I was about to answer "Array modifier", but your case may be more complex. My way to accomplish this:

  1. I make a separate scene just for one component (e.g. a window frame to be duplicated, or in your case, one full story), and model it there.
  2. After I'm done, I group it as one component.
  3. Lastly, in the main scene, I instanced the group (Shift-A -> Group Instance) as many as I needed. Each instances are free to be transformed.

Here's an example from a building I modeled, the original repeatable objects are collected in a scene for easy measurement control:

One props scene containing all repeatable objects, and one main scene where they're put to use.

What I like about this approach, is that we can always modify the base component in its own scene, and all instances in the main scene will be updated. And unlike linked-duplicates, we can add as many object to the group as needed.

Adhi
  • 14,310
  • 1
  • 55
  • 62
  • What if you want to make multiple instances of the group, and then want to modify something in just one of those instances? You can't do that with this method, can you? – foobarbecue Mar 23 '15 at 20:59
  • Yes, you can! Shift+ctrl+A will turn your group instance into a real group of objects, and then you can edit as you please. – foobarbecue Mar 23 '15 at 21:24
  • Actually, I couldn't get it to work on 2.7.2. It should say ctrl+shift+A, but that doesn't seem to work either. – foobarbecue Mar 24 '15 at 02:22