Instances are one of the most powerful aspects of Modeler's scene assembly tools. Instances in Modeler work similarly to instances in many other 3D applications. Unlike most 3D applications, Modeler is designed with instancing as a priority so that it's easy to incorporate instancing into your workflow.

What are instances?

Instances are scene objects that share a link with each other. This link means that if one instance is changed, all connected instances will be changed in the same way.

The animation below shows two instances. Notice how the changes made to the instance on the left also happen to the instance on the right.

This is useful functionality to have - imagine you are working on a sculpt with dozens of repeating elements. For example, a mechanism that has dozens of screws, or an alien with 100 eyes. Without instancing, if you wanted to update the appearance of the screws or eyes, you would need to update each one individually. Instead, you can make every screw or eye an instance, and then you only need to update one of them for all the others to match.

How do instances work?

Instancing uses a trick to work under the hood. With any set of instanced objects, there is actually only a single object that is in multiple places at once.

To better explain, imagine you have a new scene, and you create a layer with a single sphere of clay.

When you duplicate that layer, what Modeler does in the background is create an identical second layer. The first layer and second layer aren't connected in any way, they just happen to have the same contents - a single sphere in each layer. This is why if you modify one of the spheres, the sphere in the other layer is not affected.

Instead, if you create a linked duplicate of the clay, Modeler does something different. When you create a linked duplicate (or instance) Modeler doesn't create a second layer. Instead, it creates a transform, which is just a combination of a location, rotation, and scale, and a pointer to the original layer. In other words Modeler says "this layer also exists in this other position".

Although it looks like there are two layers, it's actually just the same layer twice. This is why every object in a set of linked objects has the same name - you can see this on desktop in the scope panel, scope into linked objects and they will share a name.

Performance

Because instances don't actually store much data - they just store a unique transform and reference to the original object - they are very performant. Modeler can easily display and work with hundreds or thousands of instances of a single object.

This is why in complex scenes it's often better to work with instances wherever possible.

Start using instances

Instancing is the foundation of another of Modeler's advanced assembly tools, repetition. If you have used mirror or radial repetition, you have already used instancing. To place individual instances however, you can use the Select tool.

1. Create a scene with a scene object that contains clay.
2. Select the Select tool from the Palette.
3. Select Linked duplicate under the Select tool options
4. Select and move the scene object you wish to instance.
5. The new instance and the original scene object are linked with one another. In other words, they are instances of each other.
6. Scope into either instance and edit the clay to modify both instances simultaneously.

Convert an instance to a normal layer

It's often useful to create instances while blocking out a scene, but sometimes you may need to add detail to a single instance without impacting connected objects. You can convert an instanced object into a standard object without impacting the objects it's connected to (all other instances will still be connected with each other).

To convert an instance to a standard object:

Art examples

This scene by Joshua Eiten made heavy use of instancing in plants, rocks, and wood.