Housing 101 – Double or Nothin’

Welcome back to another installment of my Housing 101 series! At this point you’ve already dipped into the advanced tools so maybe you’ve graduated to 102 level. In any case, like a creepy bad movie, today we’re going to explore the magical powers of children and clones.

From-scratch rowsdower stables.

Building complicated structures or set pieces at your house can often require using multiples of the same item as building blocks. Maybe you’ve moved and scaled a wall just the way you want it, but now you need a few more wall sections to finish off the room. You could place them by hand, but I know from experience that it is almost impossible to get things positioned and scaled exactly the same every time. Instead, why not just make some clones?

Once you have your first piece all placed, select it and open the advanced controls. At the bottom, you’ll see a “Copy Transform” button. Before you hit it, you’ll want to select the radio buttons beneath it. These 3 buttons from left to right toggle the Position, Rotation, and Scale of the object (in that order). Choose which attributes you want to copy, or select all 3 for an exact duplicate placed in the exact same spot.

Double check you’ve clicked those 3 radio buttons if you want an exact copy!

After you’ve copied the transform, escape out of the controls so you don’t accidentally mess with your first piece. Then open your crate and place your second object anywhere you like. Open the advanced controls back up and hit the “Paste Transform” button and you’re all set! As far as I can see, you have to recopy the transform every time you want to apply it to a new piece, but otherwise it is quick and painless to make a whole army of giant lopp plushies, or whatever else your heart desires!

I’ll also note that you don’t have to make exact clones. You can copy the transform from one object and paste it onto a completely different object. This way you can match the rotation and placement of an angled wall to be sure the window you hang there is rotated the same way!

The second part of today’s lesson is about children. Nope, teaching you about the birds and buzzbings isn’t in Gracie’s job description, just house construction! In the screenshot here you can see I’ve set up my bed with some plushies on it. Because of the way I positioned things with the advanced controls, if I decided to redecorate and move my bed, I’d have to reposition all the plushies too. Lucky for me, I can turn those plushies into “children” instead. Even better, we don’t even need to use the advanced controls to do it!

Glue those plushies to the bed!

I can simply select each plushie, click the link to parent button, then click on the bed. Now all my little fluffy animals will move right along when I slide my bed to the other side of my bedroom! If you’ve linked things and decide to change them up later, you can unlink from parent individually, or to clear everything at once you can select the parent object and click “unlink all children.” This process makes moving groups of objects a breeze instead of a nightmare.

That’s it for today’s lesson. We’re drawing close to the end of my lesson plan for Housing 101 now. If there’s anything you would like me to cover please leave a comment and let me know!