Orienting objects to a live object in Maya

Steve Schulze

Hey gents.
I'm adding individual feather planes (lots and lots of planes) to a bird and am trying to work out the most efficient way to do so. I've made the body live which makes placing the feathers easier but they don't rotate to orient to the surface is ther any option/script/whatever to get this going. It'd be a big time saver.

Illusions

There is probably a way to automate this, but in case this is something urgent, I can tell you that under the Modify menu there are three separate tools that might be useful: Snap Align Objects, Align Tool, Snap Together Tool. Experiment and see which one works best for you.

Although for an automated solution wouldn't MoP's mopKnit script work as well?

SpeCter

Maybe you could try the Nex Plugin for maya it has a similar feature like the Live Mode of maya but way better, but i don´t know if this will help you with your problem though, this was just what came to my mind

throttlekitty

Depending on the style you're after, you could probably use Extended Duplicate along a few curves. I've seen array duplicators, but I'm not sure if any accept surfaces as their base.

Frump

Search for some object paint scripts... I know they exist and I've seen some on polycount before. What it is is placing down a bunch of duplicates of selected geo on the surface of some other selected geo.

Here's one example that I haven't used that you could try: http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/modeling/c/sppaint3d