8

458 Chapter 7: Creating Copies and Arrays
At some point, if you wanted to see w hat your
characters would look like as "cone-heads," you
could apply a Taper modifier to the original head,
and have all the other characters take on the same
feature. You could give the original character a
very pointed head, then apply a separate Taper to
some referenced characters to reduce the point
toward normal.
For swimming fish, you mig ht choose to ma ke all
members of the school as referenced objects based
on a single, original fish. You could still control
the swimming motion f rom the original fish, and
also add modifiers to individual fish in the school
to vary their behavior.
Cl on in g Ob je cts
Techniques f or Cloning Obj ects
3ds Max provides several techniques for copying
or duplicating objects;
cloning is the general term
for this process. These techniques can be used to
clone any selection set.
•Clone
•SHIFT+Clone
• Snapshot
•Array
•Mirror
•SpacingTool
•CloneandAlignTool
Sha red Featur es
While each technique has distinct uses and
advantages in cloning objects, in mos t c ases the
cloning techniques share some similarities in how
they work:
• Youcanapplyatransformwhenyouclone.
New objects are moved, rotated, or scaled as
they are created.
•Thetransformisrelativetothecurrent
coordinate system, axis constraint, and
transform center.
• When cloning creates new objects, you have
the choice of making them copies, instances,
or references.
Eachofthefollowingitemsisdiscussedlaterin
this chapter.
Clone
Using the Clone command on the Edit menu is
the easiest method for copying an object in place;
no transformation is involved. See
Clone (page
1–461)
.
SHIFT+Clone
SHIFT+Clone clones an object when you transform it.
You can clone an object as you transform it
interactively in the viewport. The process is
referred to as
SHIFT+Clone (page 1–463) :the
technique of holding down the SHIFT key while
transforming a selected object w ith the mouse.
Quick and versatile, this technique is probably
theoneyou’llusemostoftentoduplicateobjects.
Snap settings give you precise results.