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duplicate detach
Home > Duplicate, detach & ownership
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Make an independent copy, cut an object free from its construction, and understand which objects own which.
Duplicate (Edit menu, or ⌘D - Ctrl+D on Windows) makes an independent clone of the selected object or group. The copy is its own thing: it carries its own boundary edges rather than sharing them with the original, so editing or adding a seam to one tile no longer changes its copy, and deleting a tile only drops its own edges.
The copy still rests on the same underlying points as the original - so it lands on the same lattice - but everything that makes it a separate object is cloned. The result is a clean top level and simple, predictable deletion.
Note
Because a duplicate has its own edges, per-edge changes don't travel between an object and its copy. If you want the two to stay in step, transform the original instead - see Transform tools.
Duplicate handles the two cases a little differently:
- A bare object (a single circle, region, segment: not a group) is copied fully independent. Its defining points are deep-copied too and the whole copy is nudged a small, screen-constant step off the original, so it's a free-standing translation you can move anywhere without touching the source.
- A group copies onto the same underlying points as the original: it lands on the same lattice - so the two stay registered to the shared point grid.
Both are read-only toward the geometry they copy, so duplicating never disturbs an existing cluster or lattice.
Detach cuts an object free from its construction lineage - the chain of points and steps it was built from. It copies the defining points it needs into fresh free points, so the original scaffolding can be deleted without taking the object with it. This is how you lift a shape off the geometry it was constructed on (for example, a construction resting on an imported SVG) and let it stand on its own.
Detach is careful with shared geometry: if a point or edge is also used by something outside your selection, it copies that piece rather than dragging the neighbor along. Detaching one tile never disturbs a twin next to it.
Objects in Locus can own other objects. An owned object nests under its owner in the Layers panel, travels with it, and is removed when its owner is removed. For example, a region owns its own boundary edges - they belong to it, live under it, and disappear with it.
- Independent objects are the ones you made directly. They sit at the top level and stand on their own.
- Owned objects belong to a parent and nest beneath it.
Duplicate and Detach are both about ownership: Duplicate gives a copy its own edges (rather than sharing), and Detach frees an object from what it was built on so it becomes independent.
These sound similar but cut different ties:
- Detach severs an object from its construction: the points and steps it was drawn from.
- Bake severs a result from the node graph: it turns geometry produced by nodes into free, hand-editable construction geometry.
If your object came out of the node graph and you want to edit it by hand, that's Bake, not Detach. See Bake.
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