Looks like “dupliFaces” feature of Blender - or i miss something?
Btw, there is similar plugin named “Tissue”, in default Blender addons. It can use any quad (even distorted) for clone orientation, can create very interesting results too.
Got it to work, but I had to experiment with the bl_info. And it appears under a tab of another addon I didn’t expect it to appear.
But great idea. Works well. Thanks!
I played with it for a while, and realize this is a really powerful tool.
It encourage a modulair modelling approach and its memory friendly.
What I did is making first some assets, like 1x1 tiles with combinations of insets, bevels, ridges, spikes etc.
Later on you can edit the duplicates anywhere if need.
The only thing I had to keep an eye on is to give a proper name for the assets under the “Data Object Data” tab to find my assets easily back.
It looks very promising. And there is a lot in common with such plug-ins as AMT Mesh Blend for Maya and the Polystein Kit of Modo. Maybe you need to copy some of the functionality from them?