Unlinking - without everything falling to bits

Hi,

I had a table and four chairs I linked to move them to another location. When I unlinked them, all the prims in each piece, table, chairs, were also unlinked. Now they are a mess.

How can I unlink objects from a linked object, without unlinking the prims that make up each object?

Regards to all

Rock

You didn't actually have to link them all together to keep them as one object in inventory. One of the semi-recent changes to inventory and items was "coalesced" objects, where many objects roll up into one inventory item. In the future, select all your objects that you want to move, then just take them. You will now have only one new inventory entry if things worked right - though it will usually take the name of the last object selected, so it can be sometimes tricky to tell which inventory item it was in the future.

For now, all you can do is drop fresh copies of the unlinked items, or, manually relink each individual one.

Unfortunately, you can't. Everything in selection gets unlinked.

Actually, if you click on one or more prims while using the Edit Linked Prims checkbox, you can unlink just those few. I like to marquis-select (draw a selection box around) the prims - in this case 1 chair - with this tool, then unlink, shift-click to deselect the prims I want to remain linked, then quickly re-link just those chair prims. Also handy for deselecting just one prim to unlink it then relink it to turn it into the parent prim.

Got it? Clear as mud? Can anyone else explain it better?

In the future, might I suggest that you highlight and select all of the items. (Table and chairs) Then right click and select take. You know how to do this? Arrange your table and chairs the way you want them and right click on one of the objects. Then, left click and hold the left click button down just outside of the objects being selected. While holding down the button drag the yellow selector box over all of the chairs and table. This will make them all selected and highlighted in blue. The right click on the group of highlighted objects and select take. When you rez this collection of prims from your inventory they will be unlinked, but appear the way you had them arranged. Hope that wasn't too confusing, lol.

Yup. My answer was too simplistic.. this is something I do often, although like most finer things in Second Life, it can become very tedious depending upon the complexity of what you're working with.

As well as 'taking' the table and chairs to inventory as a group or linking them as a single object, keep a chair and table in the inventory as separate objects too for when you want to create a different arrangement.

*moves to building forum*

If everything falls apart when you unlink them it is because of gravity. Try making the whole object not physical before you unlink them. Then when you are done moving things and relink them you can make it physical again.

Semi-recent? It was over a year ago!

</lurk>
*waves to wynxie, jumping in the air* ooh ooh, me!

...rez the object. Even body attachments, drag them to the ground. (linksets attached to your avatar or HUD cannot be unlinked while still attached to you. They must be dragged from your inventory to the ground first)
...right click>edit on the object
...tick "edit linked parts"
...click on the individual prim/s you want to unlink (shift-click to select multiple items to unlink. Alternately to selecting every prim one at a time, Wynx's suggestion of drawing a selection box around them is helpful if you need to select many small, hard-to-grab prims.)
...cntrl+shift+L to unlink

that will unlink *only* the selected prim/s from the entire linkset. If you take the original (but reduced) linked item back into your inventory, you see that the prims you just unlinked will be left scattered behind like Gretel's breadcrumbs.

Sorry if this is overly simplistic... just thought I'd clarify for anyone who needs it.
<lurk>