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Duplicated items act like instances when editing geometry

thoreandanthoreandan Posts: 151
in Daz Studio Discussion

Is there a way to duplicate an object in a scene as if you loaded a new version of it?

The Duplicate command (under Edit) appears to do this at first.  The duplicated objects can be shaped and posed independently, and their surface settings can be changed independently.  But if you edit the geometry of the original or any of the duplicates (or any duplicate of a duplicate) in Geometry Editor, such as creating a new surface from selected polygons, or setting a surface to be invisible, the edit is applied to the original and every duplicate in the scene.  This doesn't happen, of course, if you load another copy of the same object, but then you have to copy everything over from the original to the loaded copy if you want it to look like a duplicate.

It would be more convenient if Duplicate did the equivalent of loading a new copy of the same object, rather than creating a copy with linked or shared geometry.

Comments

  • fixmypcmikefixmypcmike Posts: 19,613

    What if you save as a Scene Subset and then merge the subset?

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 102,877

    This came up a while back and yes, DS uses only one copy of some data per asset even if there are two independent items using the asset. If you want to change one without changing the other you have to save it as a new asset first.

  • thoreandanthoreandan Posts: 151
    Richard Haseltine said:

    This came up a while back and yes, DS uses only one copy of some data per asset even if there are two independent items using the asset. If you want to change one without changing the other you have to save it as a new asset first.

    Actually, I am finding that if I load a new version of the same from the Content Library rather than duplicating it, the geometry does NOT appear to be linked, and I did not need to save it as a separate asset.  But my testing has not been extensive on that point, maybe I just got lucky.

    Also, not 100% relevant but: I thought I read in these forums that when you click the "eye" to hide a surface in Geometry Editor, that state gets saved with the scene, even though (as we all know) hiding a selection of polygons does not.  But I am finding that this method doesn't make any difference, all surfaces hidden in this manner are visible again when I reload the scene.

  • thoreandanthoreandan Posts: 151
    Fixmypcmike said:

    What if you save as a Scene Subset and then merge the subset?

    I'll try that if the issue comes up again, in this case I ended up using a different approach.  I was trying to reduce the height of the back of a throne by placing two copies at different heights, with different surfaces hidden on each of the two props.  In the end, I decided to convert the prop to a figure and rig it such that I could scale the back independent of the rest of the throne, so I didn't need two versions anymore.

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