Duplicating Meshes around a Curve? Maya

mparis

Hello!

I'm trying to make the rivets on a Taiko drum. I want them to go around the cylinder as accurately as possible. I'm assuming Maya has some sort of functionality for duplicating meshes around a curve?

Does anyone know how to do that?

Thanks alot!

mparis

Turned out just centering the rivet meshes pivot around the center worked just as well.

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CheeseOnToast

That script you're looking for is called "perform_NP_duplicate". You can do it without the script just by using a motion path though (animate>motion paths>attach to motion path).

Whargoul

You could put the pivot in the middle of the drum, rotate one copy as far as you need to match then just shift-d them all out. Then do it again for the second row.

Illusions

CheeseOnToast wrote: »

You can do it without the script just by using a motion path though (animate>motion paths>attach to motion path).

Then follow this up with Create Animation Snapshot after getting the animation to look like how you'd want your objects laid out along the curve. Easiest way to get the exact amount of objects you want is to set the animation length to the total amount of objects, and leave the increment at 1. So if you wanted 12 objects, make the animation along the curve last 12 frames, then in the Create Animation Snapshot dialog/node set the start time to 1, end time to 12, and the increment to 1.

mparis

Thanks a lot everyone!