I have a cylinder which I arrange in a grid, using 2 array modifiers: 1 to multiply along the x-axis and a second one to multiply along the y-axis.
I do this twice, and I can't get around why those arrays have different editing behaviour:
- The first array, in Object mode, I can only click-select the base object in the scene, and in the N-menu (item transform), I can change the scale and dimension of that object. It will apply to the array-instances as well. This is the expected behaviour.
- In my second array (which is exactly the same, and actually a copy of the first one, but this is now also what happens when I create the array from scratch), I can select any instance of the cylinder in the scene. And the item-transform menu shows the total dimension. I can NOT edit the base object!
Why is there different behaviour anyway? And how am I supposed to edit the base object to be applied for all instances? Obviously, I don't want to remove and re-create the array modifiers, just to edit the base object.
I'm very new (again) to blender, but I think for what I'm doing, I'm quite happy in Object mode. I am aware that I can edit the instance in Edit mode, but this one looks more like I'm not understanding something about the Object mode and arrays.
Updated Details
Here are some more details, trying to explain what behaviour I am looking for, and which is actually the behaviour I sometimes see as described in (1.)
So I'm starting with the default cube, and just to highlight which transform-dialog I'm talking about, it's dimensions are 2x2x2.
When I add an array modifier, I kind of expect to still being able to edit/transform the base object. But when I select, the object size is shown as 12x2x2. And when I transform the dimensions, the whole group/array is transformed.
However, in some cases, when I selected the base object, the transform dialog did show the dimensions of only that object, and allowed me to edit it's dimensions. Which then applied to all array-copies. This is the behavior I actually expected, but most of the times, the selection will be the whole group/array, not the single object.
I can't get to reproduce the "expected" behavior, but it was definitely there. Once, I had an array selected so that I could edit the base object - and then after saving the file, that behavior was gone.
This is unfortunately very blurry and I'm sorry for not being able to provide an example of "the good behavior". From the comments I understand that this actual behavior is expected, which also makes sense. Just confusing, that in some instances I could edit the base object.