Blender Underground

why on earth can't you apply materials, groups etc to more than one selected object??? it's driving me crazy!

you can delete multiple objects, move multiple objects to a new layer, but if you want to change the material, you have to select each individual object and then change the parameters you want...grrr.

maybe i'm missing something - i really hope so!!

Dan

Because material has the ability to be assigned to multiple objects and objects aren't. It has to be this way for nodes to work properly. When you do multiple things with an object what you are really doing is joining those objects into one and then proforming the operation (such as delete, join, move, etc) This can be seen by looking at the 3D manipulator when you select multiple objects. You don't see multiple manipulators because it is treating it as one object. Material nodes are independent from object nodes. They can be assigned to multiple objects unlike the object nodes. Sounds like I'm talking in circles doesn't it...

If you don't understand that maybe Apollos can give it a go?!?!

but when i translate multiple objects, aren't they simply added to an array, together with an offset for each object? then the translation is applied to each object in the array?

that's how i would do it ...in director...

and IF that were the case, wouldn't it also follow that whenever i selected multiple objeccts, and wanted to "do" something to them (apply a material, or CHANGE THE *&*%^% LAYER) that the same process would apply?

I know that materials can have more than one user, so why when i can make a material linked to only one object, can i not link a material link to many objects?

I'm sure i'll get over this!! but i've been working on something today which was absolutely torturous precisely because i couldn't do the things mentioned above. This is a real workflow problem for me...but i'm sure the other operatives at BU will be able to help me get over it

Want to apply one objects materials to several other objects all in one hit? Select (shift+rmb) all of the objects you want to apply the material to and finally select the object with the material you wish to copy (shift+rmb). This makes the material you want to copy the one on the active object. Now press (ctrl+L) and select material. Job done.

Arrays are terribly inefficient and have tremendous overhead. They have to be declared first and initialized to a specific size. Stack overflow occurs if that size is exceeded and space is wasted if it isn't fully used. Blender uses linked-lists with nodes pointing to the next object in the list. This gets translated into the familiar tree view in the outliner. Linked-lists are a topic in C programming that occupies whole classes.

I fully understand your gripe. I had the J2 project that had over 10,000 objects all with material that I had to delete...One....At...A....Time! It wasn't pretty. I think this would be a good job for the OOPS schematic personally especially since it is about useless for anything besides viewing. The ability to relink things in the OOPS would be a benefit to all not to mention the extra processing you can do to the object nodes if it was editable. That's why I put it in the "wish list" section...

[EDIT]

Dave to the rescue! I didn't know that tip....Mind putting it in the tips and tricks section? That is a good one!

Penix1: I'll get on to it

Dave, you are a beautiful person. I never thought of Make Links.

Excellent! I knew there was some way to get round that. Does that link only the material, or does it affect other properties too?


Thanks Dave!

[EDIT]

forget what i just typed - i re-read your post. ta!

Nice tip.
The tip of the week!

yet another gripe...i don't want to sound like a moaner, but this is a really good one:

i have a project which uses several scenes, each containing hundreds of objects.

In one of the simpler scenes, i have a cube with a few edge loops so that it subsurfs nicely (thanks for the tip Apollos ).

the intention for the cube is that it will be animated from position a to position b - which is right in front of the camera. once at position b, the camera will rotate to show each of it's sides in sequence. each side of the cube will hold some information in the form of a texture - some key words, an image...you get the picture.

I split the 6 main faces from the cube in order to avoid them becoming round due to the subsurf modifier. the faces were then parented to the remaining "shell" of the cube so that i could easily control the rotation and translation of all parts of the model...or so i thought.

i can parent the faces to the cube, but when i keyframe the cube and advance to, say, frame 12, 2 of the faces appear to "escape" from the cube. I'm so irritated by this (as i can't seem to find a workround) that i've almost given up on the project..

it'd be nice to know that someone else has experienced the same problem as me, or has a workround...Dave, I'm looking at you!

seriously - i don't mean to be negative, but this is killing me!

Dan

Dan, try selecting those faces and clearing the origin (ALT+O). What can happen at times is when an object is parented to another, and neither is at the center of the world, the transformations get whacked.

Also, make sure the individual face objects aren't sharing the parent object's Ipo block. If the Ipo was applied before you split, each would be linked to the Ipo still.

If that doesn't work, append those objects to another blend and post it. There's no reason that shouldn't work just fine.

Can you post the blend file so that I can have a look at it. It might be something very simple by the sounds of it.

Dave, i can't post it yet as I'm not at work. I have experienced the problem before, when following the planet tutorial:

http://www.uni-bonn.de/~smaeter/tutorials.php?site=planet&page=2

the problem related to when i had lots of objects/geometry, and i was keyframing objects which had other objects parented to them. i applied rotation and location keys to the parent objects, but the child object's scale would be affected.

I'll try to explain it better:

the parent object: earth
child objects: atmosphere and cloud sphere

i wanted to move and rotate the earth. After i inserted one key, the atmosphere and cloud sphere scaled up by about 6x. No idea why it happened.

Thanks for taking the time to look into it though!

Child objects inherit all their parent's transformations, scale included. If you have an SVN build, the Child Of constraint might be working, which lets you selectively apply parent->child transformations.

You can get around this with empties too in the current version. Parent all objects to the empty, then you can scale the children independently.

As for the atmosphere and clouds, since the children inherit the transformations of the parent, you probably had the earth at a scale of 6.0, which would have then been propagated throughout the hierarchy when you parented objects to it. The solution would be to apply the scale and rotation to the object before parenting (CTRL+A).

My theory was wrong; I parented an object to another that was scaled up and no change.

EDIT: I read Dan's posts too quickly. The issue is far crazier than I first interpreted.