Well this proves it…
Artemis is angry with us, no matter our choice.
I’m glad you survived the murder attempt 
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So I decided to finally get around to making a video tutorial on this process.
A laymens guide to a laymens approach; so easy to do this idiot with minimal blender knowledge could do it!
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For your blender questions it looks like the objects are parented to the legs (note the dashed relationship lines). Select all, Alt-P → clear parent should break them apart. There are other ways to group objects, such as constraints, but those are unlikely in this case.
For copying the geometry nodes you can use linking. Geo Nodes is a modifier. Select all that you want to copy to, followed by the one that you want to copy from then Ctrl-L and select Copy Modifiers. I have not done this with Geo Nodes so … I could be wrong, but more likely they will copy them but they will all be linked with the same settings (editing one will change them all). You might have to make some of the modifiers single user. When I get back to the computer I can test this out.
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Thanks Gully, I’ll try this out next time I’m messing about with Ballz
My dad brought this game home for us once from a business trip and it’s all I think about when making these 
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As expected, if you link the geometry node modifier to all of your objects then modifying the settings of one (such as the instance scale) will affect all objects. You have a couple of ways to isolate the settings.
- make the modifier single user
- attach the setting that you want to change to the group input which promotes it to an object setting.
In my test I renamed my node to MyGeoNodeTest and copied it to two other objects. Note the ‘3’ to the right of the name indicates the number of objects sharing this node. Click it and you will get a copy with a modified name (adds ‘.001’ suffix in my case)
Or you can pull the scale to the group input; the blue line here. That will move the setting to the modifier panel and it will be unique to the object (other internal settings will still be shared).
And the last thing that I forgot to mention is that once you create a node group it will be added to the “Add” menu.
So you could just drag it into any new node group and connect it up. You could export scale and hook it to a value node so you don’t need to set three values. You could also export the instance so that you could scatter different objects.
One of these days I’ll have to load steam somewhere so I can play with this.
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I liked your solution, rather creative for a Blender beginner. I figured I’d try accomplish the same result in a different way. In short I did the following:
- Import the model
- Unparent each object/part while keeping transform
- Delete everything else, so you are left with just the 6 parts in this case.
- Export as
.stlwithbatchchecked (keepapply modifierschecked too) - Start a
newin Blender and import each.stlobject you exported earlier - Separate them by moving on x or y axis (G+axis+amount)
Now you’d want to reduce the amount of vertices, while still looking ok-ish. However, you’d want these vertices sort of evenly spread, so the spheres will best cover the area after instancing. The more commonly used decimate modifier or even the limited dissolve operator, will reduce complexity easily. The downside however, a simplified mesh with an uneven spread of vertices. For a fairly good result I prefer a trick using sculpt mode to work best as follows for each object:
- Select one of the objects
- Switch to
Sculpt Mode - On the left side Toolbar, select
Simplify - On the right side Active Tool Settings, check
dyntopo - Then change
Detailingfor it toConstant Detail - Now you can adjust the
Resolution, which will adjust the ‘spread’ of vertices equally during simplify. Higher value, more vertices.
For these model parts I mostly used a value of20.
Now your tool is a white crosshair with two circles to sculpt. Because it now applies a constant, any touched section of the object will adjust to the settings you have. So in this case, you can click all over the object without issue. Most important is to touch everything. - Zoom out so your tool covers the full object at once and click/sculpt over the object. Might have to rotate to a few angles, but this is quickly done.
- Switch back to
Object Modeto select the next object.
You can check the result and amount of vertices inEdit Modeif you wish, usingundoif not satisfied, adjusting theResolutionvalue inSculpt Modeto try again
Once you have done the above, you can easily start instancing spheres for each object as follows:
- Select one of the objects
- Place a sphere (should be right below, although not required) and have it selected.
- Scale it down with
<kbd>S</kbd>followed by a value (I did 0.04 mostly) - With the sphere selected, shift-click the object to add it to the selection last
- Now set the object as parent (right-click to select, or CTRL+P)
- On the far right side select the
Object Properties(yellow icon above the wrench) - Expand the
Instancingsection and selectVerticesto show in blue
This should instance the sphere to each of the vertices of the parent object
Can easily adjust the scale of them all by scaling the single sphere you parented Make Instances Realif satisfied (right-click select or CTRL+A > M- Colour them as you wish before moving on to the next object
If you colour the parented sphere prior to making instances real, they’ll be the same.
Once all objects are done, you are left with deleting the original objects and the 6 spheres used for instancing, before moving each result together to look like a single creation. Everything is so far done in Blender, you can further scale or tweak if you wish, before exporting to the app.
Result:
Worked pretty well for me, but feel free to use whichever way you like best. There are often various ways to accomplish something (similar). Just wanted to show you an alternative, not saying this IS the way to go.
PS: Maybe we should move the discussion to a separate topic in case there will be more of this? Let us know …
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This is amazing and exactly what I was kind of hoping people would do that watch the video. Take my brute force beginner approach and sauce it up with some blender know how and expertise to further improve upon and help others.
The Base Building topic might be more the environment for this. If not some sort of new “advanced base building tips” thread, but I think the Base Building thread might be enough, pump some life back into it as it’s not as busy these days with everyone focused on corvette builds community-wide.
There are several moments in my video I mention I’ll demonstrate later and then never do. I also forgot to mention that the copy attributes plugin is searchable/downlaodable within blender so no need to navigate to a website etc.
Particularly the one I wanted to point out was when moving your spheres up or down the Y axis in the NMS Base Builder Desktop App, the spheres expand in size slightly and you get a chunkier model. I of course kept referring to it as the “z” axis in the video. I was going to show this bug/error off at the end and completely forgot to.
I think I also meant to mention that you don’t need to export into the base building app for colouring etc, you can do it all with the blender plug-in, but that it’s just something I prefer to do as blender gets sluggish with the amount of instances when made real.
I also meant to shout out to yourself, DjMonkey and @unique at the end for your help early on during the video but all I ended up doing was making a joke that made me shout out BeebleBum for unrelated base building tips
Thanks for the tips, I have some non-nms VG models I was going to mess around with next so I’ll try reducing vertices etc. I remember doing this when I was experimenting with photogrammetry and 3d printing back in 2020 and just completely forgot all about the method.
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@toddumptious Alright, I moved the discussion here.
I forgot to mention why I used batch .stl export/import. This makes it several single simplified models, in this case without changing the external mesh.
I like the more casual approach with your video, but I can see how it would not be helpful forgetting things for a viewer looking for a full on step-by-step tutorial. I’d love to see more though …
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Stl is also very friendly for my 3d printing software. I will be moving out and have my own space soon so I might just have to have a try at printing some NMS models to decorate the place with 
Reducing vertices and some edits following your advice will also make them very print-ready.
I thought about filming the process and editing, adding VO afterwards, but then I remembered my Adobe Premiere license had expired and I knew if I went to look for some freeware editing software I’d end up not doing it after downloading, installing, setting up and testing.
I already had OBS Studio set up and ready to go for screen capture when streaming Minecraft RTX a year ago so I remembered some good advice I recieved, from one of the worst people on the planet…
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Most of what pretends to be free video editing software is fake - insofar as it’s crippled or limited versions of stuff you have to pay for to get full functionality.
Having said that, Both OpenShot and Shotcut are genuinely free, open source projects. I have had some success with both. Of the two, OpenShot is simpler and easier for beginners, but it’s limited in features, and can become unstable with large projects. Shotcut is more stable and feature-rich, but has a steeper learning curve.
But IMHO, both of these are overshadowed by the arrival on the Windows scene of a stable port of Kdenlive. For many years this was the trusted mainstay of Linux video editing - but it wasn’t available for Windows PC. Again, its totally free, feature rich, and pretty stable. It’s been around for many years, and there’s loads of tutorial information available.
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I cut my teeth on Avid computer suites in college which was the industry standard for TV editing DV workstations for a long time, and unnecessarily complex when it came to doing the most basic stuff. I had already thought myself how to use Adobe Premier in my teens so it felt a little bit like going backwards.
Getting the rushes off a DV tape with Avid stations was a blast though, super fast compared to how I did it before college (I had to play the whole dv tape out to capture what was on the camera with a TV tuner).
I’m very comfortable with advanced editing suites so I’ll certainly give Shotcut and KdenLive a look, thanks for the tip 07
I still have editing class nightmares about the Avid Keyboard. Also forgot PS/2 ports were a thing for a good long while even though USB had been around for an age at this stage.
By my final year there was one iMac with pro tools and Adobe Premiere that was always heavily booked out, I recall one of my Tutors saying it would never replace Avid for TV Broadcast :-/ Youtube had just arrived that year too and he said it was a fad nobody would use. He was wrong about a lot of things.
His motto was “Make Me Care” when it came to our projects. We still joke about that whenever I meet up with old college friends. Say it at every chance we get. “Hey I just had my first child” “Make me care”
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If all you want to do is tidy up a previous recording - say, removing adverts or cleaning the start and finish from YouTube or TV recordings, then I can highly recommend Lossless Cut. It’s free, open source, fast and efficient. I use it all the time.
It’s not a fully-featured editor. It won’t do fancy dissolves or transitions, but what it does do, it does very well. The thing is, it works without re-encoding the video - so it’s very fast, and doesn’t lose any quality. It makes a project file, and a copy of the original - so it can’t damage the source file. I like it a lot.
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