duplicate along an edge

I have been digging into Blender a few months now and can not figure out how to do this.
I plan to model a viking helmet. the helmet is sort of a dome shape and will have rivets that run across the top from front to back.
How do I add the rivets so that they are aligned correctly?
I am coming from hexagon and it is very easy in Hexagon I would select an edge, extract the edge and use copy on support tool. It works kind of like an array tool.

I have been trying to figure out if I could use dupliverts.

Any help would be great.
thanks.

Here’s one way.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]204453[/ATTACH]

  • I duplicated (shift+d) a face loop from the “helmet” and separated it §
  • then straightened the top edge in that face loop and added a shrinkwrap modifier and told it to wrap onto the helmet
  • I made a new object (rivet) and parented that to the strip
  • enabled duplifaces in that strip and scaled the rivet object

Note that:

  • rivet object and its parent has to share the same object location (object origin in the same place)
  • you could use an edge loop instead of face loop and use dupliverts. If you want, see how that turns out
  • you can make the dupliobjects real by selecting the strip and pressing ctrl+shift+a

[ATTACH]204456[/ATTACH]

thanks very much. I will give it try.

Wow at last was able to get it done thank you.
I know i needed to learn how to do that, but at this point attaching the rivets to the helmet is much easier and fast in Hexagon.