Duplicate and Advanced Move- Question

[WolfieWrites]

There's this group of items that I have- a little piece of a mesh fence that I made. If I move the whole item to the left or right, it isn't going straight. I am not able to build my habitats right. Anyone know what could be causing this and/or how to fix it? Thanks so much to anyone who answers!

[Varick]

It sounds like you did not build your fence on the world grid. When placing a grid wall on the map, without moving it, it is aligned to the world grid. Just place a grid wall piece and build your fence on that. Then, while still in edit, delete the wall. Duplicate your fence and, placed in any angle, the duplicate and move function will pull out the fences in alignment. Of course, merging fences will allow you to pull out longer pieces if you wish. Hope this helps.

[WolfieWrites]

Thank you so much for responding! I will try this. Hopefully it will work!

[grampers62]

Often times we build an object from multiple non grid items as a group and often those parts are rotated in different directions. The result is that movement of those objects is unexpectedly in odd directions as the movement uses an averaged direction from the base components. Best practice is to add one grid based anchor object which will often control said movement more predictably. A bonus is that if we build our new object on one meter increments we can then use the grid snap function to precisely duplicate in straight lines. This is especially useful for custom habitat fences where we know sections will be repeated.
My lonely river building kit has many examples of this technique if you need a visual aide to the concept.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2996387761

[Varick]

Originally posted by chasbar:

Originally posted by Varick:

It sounds like you did not build your fence on the world grid. When placing a grid wall on the map, without moving it, it is aligned to the world grid. Just place a grid wall piece and build your fence on that. Then, while still in edit, delete the wall. Duplicate your fence and, placed in any angle, the duplicate and move function will pull out the fences in alignment. Of course, merging fences will allow you to pull out longer pieces if you wish. Hope this helps.

Interesting. I will have to try this as well. I always thought that you had to build on the world grid and then move the whole build in the place where you really wanted to build it. Your way sounds so much better, Varick. I am still learning after many hours in the game.

As grampers62 points out the best practice is to have a grid based anchor. If the fence is made with rotated pieces, it will not duplicate and move in alignment without a grid anchor which can be later deleted.