"Modifiers cannot be applied to multi-user data" Workaround?

[SteffenD (Steffen Dünner)]

Hi there,

I just hit a brick wall here. I have a scene consisting of several thousand objects, most of them are based on the same mesh data.

Now I want to use some simple modifiers to kind of assist modeling (Bevel, EdgeSplit, …) this mesh but as soon as I want to apply the modifiers to bake the changes into the mesh data I get the error message “Modifiers cannot be applied to multi-user data”.

On the other hand I can still do all kinds of modeling operations on the mesh (e.g. Extrude, Bevel) without errors.
This is kind of illogical to me as I just want to use the modifiers to change the mesh data which should be perfectly fine.

Any ideas to work around this? The whole scene is quite big already and doing anything manually to every single object would be a punishment.

Cheers
Steffen

[SteffenD (Steffen Dünner)]

OK, solved my own problem. ALT+C for the rescue!

Object > Apply > Visual Geometry to Mesh worked.

[JA12]

One way is to convert to mesh which applies the modifiers.

Another is switching to using instancing by selecting the objects that share object data (select one, shift+L), then object menu -> make dupli-face. That puts quad faces where the objects were and parents one of them to that object, then it uses face duplication to put one object on each. The object you’re left with can be modified.

If you need to go back from object instancing to shared object data, could make the duplicates real (ctrl+shift+A) and delete the dupli-object. That way there are again multiple objects which share data and you can use different modifiers on different objects.

[SteffenD (Steffen Dünner)]

Thanks! That “Make Dupli-Face” workflow could become handy later

[Brontobyte]

@JA12

then object menu -> make dupli-face. That puts quad faces where the objects were and parents one of them to that object, then it uses face duplication to put one object on each. The object you’re left with can be modified.

If you need to go back from object instancing to shared object data, could make the duplicates real (ctrl+shift+A) and delete the dupli-object. That way there are again multiple objects which share data and you can use different modifiers on different objects.

I am very confused. My object only has one user and that is me. Unless I am experiencing multiple realities I do not understand. How is it possible that my object thinks that I have more than one user

[Rocketman]

When talking about data in Blender, “user” does not mean you or any other person. It means any datablock which uses another datablock. For instance, if three different objects all have the same material, that material can be said to have 3 users.