Hi guys, this is just a test render. Its a ship with defensive turrets. They are behaving OK, the problem is duplicating each turret took me a while and that’s just for one ship.
I have a rigged turret, and on that rig is a bone that switches everything on/off.
It does the barrel rotation, the muzzle flares, the lamps, the bullets (geo nodes).
In my stupidity i thought I could just duplicate the turret and everything would just copy over. The rig does, and the lamps work. I need to manually duplicate the muzzle flares because they are materials with a driver for transparency. The geo nodes need duplicating and the driver in them adjusting to the new rig. The bullet object is another pain in the bum but that’s for another time.
My question is, is there an easier way to duplicate everything? Having a fleet of these is going to take forever otherwise.
I suspect you are deep copying everything instead of “Duplicate (linked)”. This produces a heavy load since Blender has to comb through a complete copy of the data for each turret.
Better to do a linked copy, so that Blender can reuse the existing data, producing a significant savings.
The best way to manage this (IMHO) is to prepare the whole turret system as a separate asset:
It sounds like you have already rigged everything to work by manipulating the armature — that’s good.
Create a .blend with nothing but the turret (and related) stuff.
You can mark it as an Asset and manage it through the Asset browser if you wish, but that is not really necessary (it just makes it easier to manage your data in a central library).
Then in the main file, link (either through the file menu or via the Asset Library) the turret object, once for each separate instance.
For each turret, make an Object Override. (This way you can use each turret’s armature to manipulate it.)
That’s an impressively golden spaceship. Royal battle cruiser or something?
Thank you! I’ve changed the textures a lot since then to be a little more detailed. Yes this is from a faction that worship the sun (Im making a youtube series).
I’ve tried having the turrets as assets and linked copies. Problem is the geometry nodes share the same and then I have to go in an manually do everything again, lots of drivers.
I’ll post a screenshot of the set up after work tomorrow and try to better show my issues.
