Copies of One Placement

5 min readUpdated Aug 2026

Four mounting bosses on one plate are the same boss four times. Hold Shift while you click and each click puts another one down, all of them belonging to a single timeline item. Change the boss diameter later and all four change together.

The Copies list and Add copy sit under the parameters. Those parameters belong to the item, not to a copy, so a change moves all of them.

Placing a run

Shift-click during a placement is place-and-continue. The first click creates the timeline item. Every click after it, as long as Shift is still held, appends another copy to that same item. Let Shift go and the run ends.

You do not have to decide up front. Open a placed item from the timeline and the popover carries an + Add copy row, described as Place another copy (hold Shift for several). It restarts the placement session in append mode, so the next click adds to the item you already have rather than starting a new one.

Once an item holds more than one copy, a Copies list appears in the popover, listing them as Copy 1 upward. Click a row to edit that copy. The trash icon on a row removes it and leaves the rest alone.

What is shared and what is not

The object, its version and every parameter override are held by the item, not by the copy. All the copies in one item are the same object, at the same version, with the same numbers. Edit a parameter and every copy moves at once.

Each copy owns only its position, its rotation and the geometry it produced. That is the whole list.

So the rule is short: use copies for things that must stay identical, and separate items for things that must diverge. Four bosses of one diameter are one item with four copies. Three bosses at 6 mm and one at 8 mm are two items. If you find yourself wishing one copy had different numbers, you needed a second item, and the fix is to delete that copy and place the object again.

The trade is worth making on purpose. Four copies in one item is one number to change when the screw you are designing around turns out to be M4 rather than M3. Four separate items is four chances to forget one, and the one you forget is the hole the screw will not go into.

The version the copies use is shared for the same reason. Every copy in an item comes from one object at one version, so a placement cannot end up with two copies built from different releases of the same object. Versions and What Goes Wrong covers choosing that version.

Code objects do not have copies

A code-on-region or code-on-body object has no copy list. Shift-clicking one stamps a new timeline item on every click. You get the same number of results on screen, but they are independent features from the moment they land.

That is the opposite trade. Each one can be tuned separately, and nothing keeps them in step: a change you make to one is a change to one. If you want twelve code placements to match, you have to edit twelve of them, so place them deliberately rather than in a fast Shift run.

What is missing

A placed item can carry a custom name, and the popover displays it, but there is no way to type one. There is no rename control for an item or for an individual copy, so the Copies list reads Copy 1, Copy 2 and so on and nothing else. Tell copies apart by clicking a row and watching which one highlights in the viewport.

When it fails

A copy vanishes and the others stay. The trash icon on a Copies row deletes that copy only. Undo brings it back; there is no separate confirmation. To get rid of the lot, delete the timeline item rather than emptying the list one row at a time: right-click its pill in the timeline and choose Delete. The same menu carries Disable, which takes every copy out of the model and leaves the item there to switch back on.

Editing one copy changes all of them. You edited a parameter, which is shared. Position and rotation are the only things a single copy owns.

One copy fails and the rest are fine. Each copy is replayed on its own and reports its own state, so a single copy can come back failed or unavailable while its siblings rebuild. Click that row first. Versions and What Goes Wrong covers what the states mean.