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Is it possible to instance a group of objects in one shot?

JeremyDJeremyD Posts: 265
edited July 2017 in The Commons

Hello,

I have a bunch of rocks that I've placed in my scene. Each rock is from the same prop and I've Instanced that rock several times and changed the size and orientation. I've grouped them all together under one group called "Rocks." I would like to duplicate these group of rocks really quickly and efficiently so I thought I could just instance that Rock group but it will only instance the original Rock and nothing else. Is it possible? Hopefully this makes sense!

Thanks,

Jeremy

Post edited by JeremyD on

Comments

  • kaotkblisskaotkbliss Posts: 2,918

    You can group just the instances together, and then select the group and go to edit->duplicate->duplicate node heirarchy

    I think that is the closest you will get.

  • srieschsriesch Posts: 4,243

    At least in 4.8, it appears you cannot instance instances, only duplicate them.

  • carrie58carrie58 Posts: 4,160

    how about parent all the rocks to a null then save the group as a scene subset and then all you have to do is load as many as you want into your scene and move them arould with the null

  • DaWaterRatDaWaterRat Posts: 2,887

    I remember doing something similar with parenting, but I also remember that there was a trick to it which I don't remember.

  • j cadej cade Posts: 2,310
    sriesch said:

    At least in 4.8, it appears you cannot instance instances, only duplicate them.

    The good news here is AFAIK duplicated instances are still instances, so they have all the same memory saving advantages.

    So you can easily take a group of instances and duplicate them

  • srieschsriesch Posts: 4,243

    Yep.  You just have to remember that if you are creating a scene subset to use, it will affect your design if you intend to instance it later.  I realized this when attempting to instance something and discovering a bunch of missing parts.  Had I known this before creating it, it would have saved me some work.  Luckily not much, but had I gone hog-wild creating things it could have been a lot. Hoping to save somebody else work as well, since it isn't an obvious thing.

  • j cadej cade Posts: 2,310
    DaWaterRat said:

    I remember doing something similar with parenting, but I also remember that there was a trick to it which I don't remember.

    You can instance groups of objects. Take several objects add them to a group and then instance the group.

     

    So, say if you have  a table and 4 chairs you can group all of them together and then instance and place them as you want.

     

    Although it is a bit more memory friendly when rendering to make all the chairs instances of ecahother, it can actually (somehow) end up more memory friendly in the viewport to insance groups of things (NGL the DS viewport is in dire need of optimizations on this front)

  • JeremyDJeremyD Posts: 265

    Okay thanks all. I will try the Duplicated Node Hierarchies. I was hesitant on doing that with my group because I wasn't sure if that would count as instances. I'm trying to save as much memory as possible! :)

  • kaotkblisskaotkbliss Posts: 2,918
    j cade said:
    DaWaterRat said:

    I remember doing something similar with parenting, but I also remember that there was a trick to it which I don't remember.

    You can instance groups of objects. Take several objects add them to a group and then instance the group.

     

    So, say if you have  a table and 4 chairs you can group all of them together and then instance and place them as you want.

     

    Although it is a bit more memory friendly when rendering to make all the chairs instances of ecahother, it can actually (somehow) end up more memory friendly in the viewport to insance groups of things (NGL the DS viewport is in dire need of optimizations on this front)

    That's the problem

    If you have 1 table, 1 chair and 3 instances of that chair and group them together

    When you instance that group, the new instance will only have 1 table and 1 chair. It won't instance the instances.

     

    I also found out that if you try and do ctrl+c to copy an instance's xyz coordinates, then ctrl+v in another instance to move it, the 2nd instance will become an exact copy of the first instance even if they were 2 completely different objects.

    For example, you have 1 table and 1 chair. You instance both the table and the chair. Move the table instance to a new location, then ctrl+c on the table instance then ctrl+v on the chair instance to move it to the table and the chair becomes a table instance.

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