Skip to content

Expand Placements

In one sentence: Push placement values from parent objects down into their children, baking absolute positions into each child and resetting the parent to the origin.

Overview

Workbench: OpenSCAD
Menu: OpenSCAD → Expand Placements
Shortcut: none

Propagates the placement matrix from each object downward through its children. After this operation each child has an absolute world-space placement and its parent sits at the origin.

Intuition

Imagine a set of Russian dolls where each outer doll holds the inner doll in a specific position. Expand Placements takes the "where I hold my child" offset from each doll and adds it permanently to each child's own "where I am" value — so each doll now knows its absolute position independently, and all the nesting offsets are zeroed out.

When to use it

  • You are preparing geometry for export and need absolute (world-space) coordinates in each object.
  • A downstream operation requires objects at the origin.
  • You want to simplify a deeply nested placement hierarchy.

When NOT to use it

  • On assemblies with live constraints — this operation bakes placements and can break constraints or expressions that depend on relative placement.
  • When reversibility is needed — the original relative placements are not preserved.

Step-by-step

  1. Select the root object(s) of the placement hierarchy to expand.
  2. Choose OpenSCAD → Expand Placements.
  3. Each child object's placement is updated to the world-space position.
  4. The parent placement is reset to the origin.

Common mistakes and pitfalls

Extrusions and dependent features break after expansion

Cause: Features like Pad or Pocket depend on relative placement of their sketch. Baking the placement changes the coordinate frame.
Fix: Use Expand Placements only on final geometry intended for export, not on live Part Design features.

Python API

import FreeCADGui as Gui
Gui.doCommand("Gui.runCommand('OpenSCAD_ExpandPlacements', 0)")

See also