Automate Copy & Paste of face or material

[jimahiggins]

I want to automate the ability to copy and paste faces and their associated material. Specifically I am trying to duplicate Google Earth Terrain on multiple layers with the terrain diced up into smaller faces. Additionally, I need to create individual materials with the ability to set their opacity.

Thanks for any and all help,
Jim

[Chris Fullmer]

Is this like 5 copies of a terrain? Or like a Thousand? This can be done rather quickly by hand:

• Create a bunch of target layers.
• Import one terrain. Unlock it and delete the flat version if you want. Maybe move the terrain one onto layer 0.
• Select it and hit ctrl-c for copy.
• Now cahnge active layer to the next layer and do a paste in place.
• Change layers and do paste in place
• repeat as needed

To speed things up, make a shortcut key for paste in place. And I like to have the layers toolbar open to switch the active layer quickly.

That is a possible quick do it by hand method for the copying and pasting.

And then for materials, you could remove all materials from the original terrain veofre copying and pasting. Then just create a new color for each copy and apply the color to that terrain group. That is relatively quick too.

These are good options if you only have a fairly small amount of terrains, especiialy if it is a once only type project. But if you have 50 terrains to make, and you need to repeat this process on dozens of files in the future, you would probably want to get in and automate as much as possible in Ruby, which is mostly do-able.

[jimahiggins]

Chris thanks for the feedback, and I have thought about doing the copy and duplication of the terrain manually. One more question, is there any way to perform the "Make Texture Unique" automatically. Once I get the duplicate terrain (on a seperatre layer), I want to dice up the terrain into smaller faces so I can add an opaque coloring to the individual faces. Basically, I need to make all faces in the terrain have their own materials/textures in order to paint or color them individually (while they still retain their own terrain image/graphic).

Thanks a ton,
Jim Higgins