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  • Published 10 Aug 2019

Changing the properties of multiple selected objects/bones/lamps/etc.

Disclaimer: I'm almost certain someone has brought this up before, but I failed to find it when searching.

One thing that has always bugged me about Blender is how I'm unable to change the properties of all my selected entities at the same time. If I have 200 animation bones that I want to change from being deformation bones to not deforming anything, I have to click each and every bone one after another and make the change manually 200 times. Unless I'm missing something very obvious? The same seems to be true for all other types of entities too. I can't change the light type, intensity, colour, etc. of multiple lamps, for example (not without making them all linked copies, at least).

On a similar note: Why can't I select multiple vertex groups in the vertex group list (with shift select or box select)? I know I can delete specific ones by using the "delete all locked/unlocked" function, but mirroring vertex groups, for example, has to be done manually for each entry. Is there a reason for this limitation?

Sorry if this issue is addressed elsewhere. Please provide me with a link if you know where to find it.

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Development Status: Archived

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theon66
10 Aug 2019

5 Comments

jason

Properties for multiple selected objects can be modified by pressing <kbd>Alt</kbd> when changing a particular value. This has been in Blender since 2.7x, I believe.

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theon66 Author

* @Jason van Gumster * Oh wow, it works! Thank you!

1
Josephbburg

Python is your friend here. It's easy to modify many properties of many objects with complex checks using very basic Python. For example, let's say I have 100 bones: 

for pb in bpy.context.selected_pose_bones:
    for c in pb.constraints:
        if (c.name == "Copy Location"):
            c.owner_space = 'WORLD'
            c.target_space = 'WORLD'

I don't know why, but it looks like Dillo has screwed up my whitespace. Be sure to indent properly if you want a Python script to actually run!

This script changes the "Copy Location" constraint on every selected bone to copy it's target's world space to its own world space.

theon66 Author

* @Josephbburg * Python is absolutely not my friend. Thanks for the explanation though!

Josephbburg

* @theon66 * I didn't notice this at first but there's a menu item for changing bones from deform to non-deform (Shift-W opens the menu).

If you find yourself doing repetitive tasks often, you should learn Python. If you're rigging with 200 animation bones, you should learn Python. I did a rig yesterday with 460 bones in it, lots of constraints and complex parts. Python saves me from doing manual work when I have to bind 32 bones to 32 parents and apply 32 constraints between the parents and 32 other bones! Provided there's an easy way to select between them, I can do this in a few minutes with about thirty-ish lines of code. And it's easy enough to reuse and modify the code.

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