Hi Burr, I do want to have a kind of "instance" type mechanism at some point in the future. It will probably be a little while before I can get to that though, it is a fairly involved thing to add.

re: pieces and solids - I'm afraid I'm not quite 100% certain what it is that you're trying to do here.

I got the file you posted previously where you wanted to solidify those open posts, but it sounds like you are also working on something slightly different than that?

Do you have an example of the file in a state before you started doing boolean merge or trimming to it? If you could post that instead of the one that was already trimmed, it would probably help me understand what you want to do.

If you don't want to cut up the base "shelves" kind of part and you have some long pillars that you want to be sliced up, for that you would not want to do merge, but instead pick all the pillars and then do boolean difference and use the shelf as the cutting object. That will cut up the pillars how you want I think. It will also remove the shelf but to solve that problem before you do the boolean select just the shelf and do a Ctrl+C to copy it to the clipboard, then do Ctrl+V after the boolean is complete to paste the shelf back in again.


I think that may be what you want to get? Oops - I see now where I got confused and put you on the wrong track with merge, I thought you wanted the shelf part cut as well (which is what merge would be for) because I thought it was cut up in your previous example but I see now that what I thought were holes were just the top parts of the posts showing through.

- Michael