Changing the surface of a cloned object?

[Polymangler]

Is there a way to change the surface of a cloned object without altering the original?

he's my scene, i have 2 fetuses in the scene and one needs to have a different skin color. So i've cloned the lil guy but i can't change his skin cause if i change the shader on that surface the other one willl change as well..i'm sure this i really really easy but i'm just not seeing how to do it

thanks

[richpr]

Assign a new surface to the cloned fetus (Q)... then you could copy the original surface over the new one (copy/paste in Surface Editor). Then you would have 2 the same fetuses but with different surfaces (well the same, but different names). Then change the second surface. parameters..

[Polymangler]

thank you for the reply richpr....i should have mentioned that the cloned fetus was cloned in layout...

is there a way to assign a new surface in layout?

[richpr]

I guess you could make a "dummy box" with the new texture you want and load that into the scene, which would make that surface available... Then you might be able to do a copy and paste...

[richpr]

Eh not... you get the new surface, but it replaces it on both (original and clone)... gets you nowhere... ;) You need an expert!

[richpr]

I figured out a way, but you still need Modeler... ;)

I select the Clone and clicked the Modeler button, I expected that it would be the solution to edit the surface there and save under another name and all would be fine in Layout... Not.

I saved it as Fetus2 (??) and both objects in Layout were now Fetus 2 and had the same surface... :(

However I took the original Fetus2 (1) and did a Replace with object... Fetus1.lwo...

This gives you two different ones... In surface editor you now have two separate objects with separate surfaces...

I guess that they are no longer clones, so it seems to defeat some purpose... Maybe the limiation to a clone is just that... You can change it's position etc. but not its surfaces? Like an instance of sorts...

[Polymangler]

wow man thanks for checkin all that out for me...i think you might be on to something with that last method you posted...i'll give that a try. something occured to me also i could alter the surface and the parts that i want to just effect fetus2 i could keep inside a ref object null and use falloff..since they don't have to interact that might be a way of routing it......heh who'd of thought it'd be this much trouble :rolleyes:

again thank you soo much for helping me with this man you rock

[Polymangler]

woohoo got it ;)....pretty much just did what you said although it didn't like doing a replace object to just one of them, it kept changing both, so i replaced the copy with a null and then replaced that with the saved copy...and vualla it worked

thanks again man