Cloners
Repeat any object in a grid, a line, a ring, over a sphere, across another object's surface, or as a loose pile that settles on its own.
A cloner takes one object and repeats it in a pattern, the way a cloner does in Cinema 4D. It stays one object however many copies it makes, so a field of five hundred spheres is as easy to move, select and save as one, and it stays fast.
Make a cloner
Select an object and hold C. A dial opens at your cursor: point at a layout and let go.
| Layout | What it does | Settings |
|---|---|---|
| Grid | Rows, columns and layers | Count X, Count Y, Count Z, Spacing |
| Line | A row along one axis | Count, Spacing, Axis |
| Radial | A ring | Count, Radius, Orient, Face ° |
| Sphere | Spread over the surface of a sphere | Count, Radius, Align |
| Object | Scattered over the surface of another object | Count, Seed, Align |
| Dynamic | A loose cloud that pushes apart and settles, like a physics simulation | Count, Radius, Turbulence, Turb Scale, Re-simulate |
For Object, the cursor turns into a crosshair after you pick the layout: click the object whose surface the clones should cover. Move that object later and the clones follow it. Delete it and the cloner goes back to the original object, which you can undo.
Orient on a radial cloner turns each clone to face Out, In, along the ring (Tan), or not at all (None). Align turns clones to follow the surface they sit on.
The Cloner panel
Selecting a cloner opens the Cloner panel. The tabs at the top switch the layout, keeping any settings the two share, such as the count.
Under Transform is a change applied to every clone: Pos, Rot and Scale, with a lock to scale X, Y and Z separately. Turn on Incremental and the change adds up from one clone to the next, so clone ten is moved ten times as far. That is how a line becomes a staircase and a ring becomes a spiral.
Closing the panel parks it as a tab at the bottom of the editor while a cloner is selected, so it is one click away.
Edit the original
The object a cloner repeats is still live. Change its shape or its material and every clone changes with it: select the cloner and press M to edit the material of the original.
Repeat several objects
A cloner can repeat more than one object. In Layers, drag an object onto the cloner's row and it joins what the cloner repeats. The panel then shows a Sources section to choose how they are shared out:
| Option | |
|---|---|
| Order | One after another, in the order they appear in Layers |
| Reverse | The same, backwards |
| Random | Mixed, with a Seed to try another mix |
| Blocks | In runs of the same object |
Right click a source in Layers to move it up or down, or to release it back into the scene as an object of its own. To swap what a cloner repeats, drop the new object on it and release the old one.
A cloner of a cloner
Hold C with a cloner selected to clone the whole cloner, for example a ring of grids. The counts multiply, so Facet warns you once that it may slow things down, and refuses if the total would be too many.
What can be cloned
Primitives, vectors, imported models, Genesis shapes and text, flat text included. Clones appear in renders, in published scenes and in embeds, and you can change their counts per breakpoint, for fewer clones on a phone.