Hi. I’m pretty new to blender and trying to understand some stuff…could use some help.
I was building a tree and used a process I found in a tutorial. It involved making linked duplicates of a single leaf, a single twig, and a single branch. Essentially, I made linked duplicates (alt+D) of the leaves and parented them to a twig. Then I selected the whole twig, made a linked duplicate of that several times. Then I parented the linked duplicates of the twig/leaf clusters to the branch. Every time I made a duplicate, I copied it from the original set…not from a duplicated set (don’t know if that mattered at all, that is what the tutorial told me to do.)
I wanted to make some modifications to my leaf/twig/branch set up that would affect all of my duplicates. To start with, I scaled up the mesh of the “master” leaf to fill in some dead areas on the tree, which affected all of the leaves beautifully. But then, because I increased the size of each leave, I had too much “leaf volume” overall, and wanted to cut down the number of leaves I had altogether. I was also trying to do this in an effort to make my .blend file a little less heavy with geometry. It was chuggin’ pretty bad with all them leaves!
So my approach was to go to my original “branch/twig/leaf/” set up and delete a few of the leaves. I thought because all of the copies I made were linked, that the corresponding leaves on all of the duplicates would be deleted. But they weren’t. Obviously, I don’t have perfect grasp of the whole parent-child, linked-duplicate relationship thing in blender.
Essentially what I would LIKE to have happen is to be able to remove some of the leaves on my “master” group of leaves/twigs/branch and have it affect all of the duplicated ones. Let me also be clear—to start with, I did not put all of the components of my “master branch” into an actual object group—I only selected all of them and duplicated them, as the tutorial told me to.
In the future, I would love to know how to orient a bunch of objects that have relationships with each other (like my twigs/leaves/branches) and make duplicates in such a way that if I modify the original group of objects (like by deleting some of them or adding to them) that those changes will carry over into the linked duplicates that already exist.
I would also appreciate if someone would kindly explain why my method of “thinning out” the leaves did not work, AND offer any advice on how to go about doing it properly. Thanks!