Duplicating actions

Does Blender have a command that duplicates objects and actions?

For example, I’m creating a chequed floor with black and white tiles and I’ve just spent the past 30mins duplicating a cube, moving it next to another one, then going through all alternating cubes, changing the colour to white and then the same for all the others changing the colour to black.

Even shift-rightclicking several objects will only change the first object picked.

Any ideas?

You could have created one black cube and one white cube, then applied an array modifier to each cube. For a 1 unit cube, a Y relative offset of 2.2 would work (create cubes in the top view. Copy the two new rows, arrange them opposite the first combination. Then press the Apply button on the 4 ‘parent’/seed objects to “freeze” the array’d geometry. Select the two rows and join them with ctrl-j, then duplicate that object as many times as you want ! :slight_smile:

There’s no “automatic macro language” / or script recorder though, you’d have to code the operations it manually in python. There are many scripts in the scripts window for common (and not so common) operations.

Mike

I’m not sure why you want the tiles to all be individual cubes. Just grab a nice texture and normal map and apply them to a plane. The black and white texture would be simple to make. Just repeat it and apply the normal map. Also only 4 verts…Or if you really need to have them all individuals for some reason, make a black cube, then make a white cube. Dupe them (that’s 4) andf then move them, then dupe them (8) etc…It would take less than a minute to make hundreds that way. Below, a quick scene with a black and white floor. Texture, normal and reflective. Is this what you are trying to do? By the way, shift-D duplicates objects. You can duplicate one or a group of objects this way. Also, when you duplicate an object, you duplicate all of it’s properties - including material. You have to turn the material into a single user copy. That way, it’s a new material and won’t affect everything else with the same material.http://www.dougturner.net/blackwhitefloor.jpg

Thanks for the answers.

I am trying to do it as seperate objects, so the ‘checkerboard’ material wouldn’t be an option.

But thanks again, learnt something new (again) so will go away and practice with that.