Maya: Duplicate over curved surface?

Belltann

Hi.

I would like to duplicate objects over a curved surface, like bolts etc. At the moment i use make live in maya, but then i need to tweak the position seperatly to get the bolts to point out from the mesh. Do you know if there is a script or technique to simply duplicate an object on a surface and the object will get transform info from the surface normal?

Ive seen it in max, but would be cool to get it in maya.

Sorry if this question allready been posted.

cheers!

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Belltann

TeriyakiStyle: Cheers dude. The tool looks great but its toooooo old im using maya 2011 X64, and thats not supported at the moment. Do you have any alternative ways to get it to work on 2011?

ghib

Not sure if this is exactly what you want (I'm in a bit of a rush today) but I've found it very useful for a lot of things. sppaint3d

CheeseOnToast

Try this :

geometryConstraint -weight 1;
normalConstraint -weight 1 -aimVector 0 1 0 -upVector 0 1 0 -worldUpType "vector" -worldUpVector 0 1 0;

To use it, select an object you want to constrain to, then select your bolt. Then run the script. You should now be able to drag the bolt around with the middle part of the move tool handle and it'll respect the normal of the constraining object. Make sure you use "duplicate special" to create more bolts, with the option "Duplicate Input Graph" ticked.

Belltann

ghib: Cheers bud i'll check it out.
CheeseOnToast: You sir, you rock! Works as a charm

CheeseOnToast

Cheers, but it's not my script. Got it from someone here on PC a while back. Can't remember who though.

SP paint is great, but it's better suited to random scatter in organic environments. Well worth checking out though.

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