Jan van den Hemel writes:
Did you know you can make duplicates along a path? This quick tip shows you how!
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About the Author
Jan van den Hemel
Hi, my name is Jan and I help companies by creating short videos for their websites and internal use, mostly as a freelancer for agencies. I post daily one-minute tutorials for Blender users and wrote the popular "Blender Secrets" e-books.
5 Comments
Wow that's an interesting way of doing it, i wasn't aware of the duplication by frames. I'm curious though in what ways this might be better than creating an array along a path. Is this just an alternate method? Does this have advantages over an array + path? Great video too.
If you mean a combination of the Curve and Array modifiers, your mesh will be deformed and bent (especially noticeable at the places where the curve object bends the most). Sometimes that's what you want, sometimes you just want the instances of your object to follow the curve without any deformations whatsoever. That's where this method comes in handy.
I tried to use this method whit straight angles paths, for example decorations along walls, but the objects close to corners get rotated like following an invisible curve. Curve resolution helps but insufficient.
Is there a solution other than manual fix?
If you have a straight path, you may want to uncheck Follow Curve in the Follow Path constraint. But if the path has curvy areas as well as corners that won't help, at least in my example the instances got rotated. After trying different settings, this is what I've come up with - shift-select all the node handles that form the corners of the path > tap G(or Tools shelf > Handles: Free) that should do the trick. This is pretty much a manual fix though (Blender 2.79b).
Yes, thank you! It's still better than converting to separate objects and replace the ones close to corners.