Copying Objects

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Revision as of 14:57, 11 October 2021 by Roy 043 (talk | contribs) (Removed the "More" paragraph. It just repeated links already given.)

Overview

Like many other computer programs FreeCAD has the ability to cut, copy and paste objects. Document objects may be freely copied within a document or between documents using the Std Copy, Std Paste and Std DuplicateSelection commands.

Please consider that the copy-pasted objects are not dependent on the original. If you want dependent clones please use Draft Workbench's Clone or Part Design Workbench's Clone. If you need neither a dependent clone nor a parametric replica, you may also use Part Workbench's Simple Copy. For patterned clones, please look into the Other Methods section of this page.

Copying Linked Objects

Document objects may be linked to other objects (for example, a Pad feature is linked to its Sketch, and a Fusion feature is linked to its component objects). This means that some care must be exercised in selecting objects to copy.

If an object is selected without its children, those children are not automatically duplicated by Copy/Paste or Duplicate Selection. In this case, the copied object may exhibit unexpected behaviour due to expected links not being present.

In general, recommended practice is to select all dependent objects when copying a parent object.

Finding and Positioning Pasted Object(s)

After a copy-paste operation, it may not be obvious where the new objects are located in the 3D view. That is because the new objects have the same Placement property as their originals. Toggle the Visibility property (Spacebar) to hide the originals and then move the copies to their correct position, for example using Std TransformManip or Std Placement.

Other Methods

Like most things in FreeCAD, there are many ways of making a copy. For more ideas, look at:

Notes

  • If an object to be copied has links to object(s) not in the selection, FreeCAD will ask if the unselected objects should be included in the copy operation.