Property Paste – Plugin for Copying the Appearance and Transforms of parts V1.2

Hello DevForum

Here is a Studio Plugin I have made to copy and the appearance or transform properties of a part and paste those properties onto other parts and models. It’s designed mostly for 3d artists, to speed up world creation where users may be dealing with a lot of parts and models. Works on Parts, MeshParts, TrussParts, WedgeParts, CornerWedgeParts, Unions and Models.

**NEW version 1.2 - Added a MaterialVariant property to the Appearance tab, so now works to copy and paste any Material Variants found on a part.

Property Paste

How to use the plugin

Install the plugin as normal from the Roblox website.

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Click on the “Property Paste” icon in the plugin tool bar to open the plugin interface.
The plugin has two tabs: Appearance and Transforms.

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On the Appearance Tab is a list of appearance properties that this plugin can copy and paste. Each property has a linked “Active?” checkbox. Clicking on these checkboxes will disable or enable the linked property from copying or pasting operations.

Select a single Part, Mesh or Union in the workspace and press the Copy Properties button. The appearance fields will be filled in with the properties from that object. Now select any number of other Parts, Meshes or Union and press the Paste Properties button. The selected objects will now have their appearance properties overwritten by the values in the fields. This will only affect directly selected objects, not child objects or objects inside models.

It is possible to manually type in values into the appearance fields if needed. However, they need to follow the exact format as shown already in the fields or the paste can fail.

Using the Appearance Paste Properties on a model will have no effect as they have no appearance properties.

The Transforms Tab contains a list of transform properties and linked checkboxes to include or exclude the properties from the copy and paste operations.

Select a single Part, Mesh, Union or Model and press the Copy Properties button to fill in the transform fields with that object’s transforms. (Copying from a model will not return a Size value as they do not have a size.) Now select any number of other Parts, Meshes, Union or Models and press the Paste Properties button. Those objects will have their size, position and/or scale overwritten by the values in the fields. (Models will not be affected by pasting a size value).

Parts, Meshes and Unions will have their Position and Orientation changed, but Models will instead have the Origin Position and Origin Orientation affected.

Technical note: When copying transform values from an object, the values are subjected to a rounding of their decimal places to 4 digits. This will not be visibly noticeable when pasted but could be technically significant.

Why use this plugin?

The appearance copy and paste can be useful when wanting to quickly transfer the look of one part to another part or large group of parts. The appearance properties will stay in the GUI and can be pasted as many times as needed, instead of having to use ctrl-c/ctrl-v across individual appearance properties.

The Transforms copy and paste can be used for a variety of tasks. The position property can be used like an align tool to bring selected objects all to a single point and it doesn’t need to have a “target” object selected like the Roblox Align Tool.

The orientation property can also be used like the align tool but working on aligning orientations instead.

I have been using the size property when replacing a mesh’s ID to “save” the size of the mesh before it is replaced and auto scales back to it’s original size. Then I can paste the size back into the mesh and it’s back to it’s original size before the ID was replaced.

I hope someone else finds it useful, currently I am using it every day in my level building work.

Thanks to @Astr0Derp, @Forummer and @Pop_Panda94 for scripting help when making this plugin. I learnt a lot about CFrames while making the transforms tab!

Versions
V1.2 - Added a MaterialVariant property to the Appearance tab.
V1.1 - Fixed issues with font size and preloaded un-ticked image.
V1.0 - Initial release

14 Likes

Ok, 3 things:

  • Very helpful! I can see myself using sometime
  • I dont like the UI though
  • How did you get web.roblox.com? You cant be <13 and have access to the forum, 13+ is www.roblox.com.

Thanks for your reply.

I know the UI is not exactly a masterpiece of beautiful design, but is there anything functional that you think needs changing?

Not sure what you mean about he web.roblox.com link. Are you saying that you cannot access the plugin link if your account is less that 13 years old? I just tested it with a <13 account and it could get to the plugin page ok.

1 Like

No, I’m saying that the forum is 13+, and web.roblox.com means you’re <13. I would recommend changing it.

With functionality, I have not found time to test it yet.

Updated the Property Paste Plugin

Version 1.1

  • Fixed an odd issue that the GUI font size had shrunk.
  • Attempted to pre-load the “unticked” image, but I dont think my code worked. :smiley:

Hey, can you make it open-source?

If you really want to view my probably bad code, then you can probably just use this technique for getting the plugin’s script.

Hey All

Just updated the Property Paste plugin to version 1.2.
Have recently been using Material Variants more often in my projects, so I added a MaterialVariant property to the Appearance tab. Now the plugin can copy and paste any Material Variants found on a part.

1 Like

I’m trying to copy and paste the properties of a beam but it doesn’t seem like this plugin was made for that, is it possible to add support for this in the future?

Yes, the plugin is only for Parts. So it only works on items that are “BaseParts”, that means Parts, MeshParts, TrussParts, WedgeParts and CornerWedgeParts. It also partially works on models and unions.

While it’s theoretically possible to make a plugin like this work on any item in Roblox Studio (such as a beam), it would be a very different plugin. At the moment I hand picked out the relevant properties that all BaseParts share, like material, transparency, scale etc… so that they can be easily moved between all BaseParts. If it supported all the items that Roblox includes, then each item would have dozens of weird and wonderful properties that would become a big mess to try and copy/paste.

So at the moment I have no plans for including other, non-part, items like beams. Possibly I might ad a collisions and physics tab? But still that would be just for BaseParts.

I’ll make it more obvious in the above text that it’s just for BaseParts.

Thanks for your question.

1 Like