duplicating mesh sections with rotation

Support Modeling
1

Apologies if this isn’t the correct forum area for how to Questions but…

I want to create an ornate holder for a glass sphere as part of my Weta raygun entry. My design features a repeating curlicue pattern coming out of a “cup” of metal. I can easily model the cup and one curl by copying and separating part of the sphere mesh and modelling the curl. However, what I want to be able to do is “repeat” the curl around the edge of the cup mesh.

I am certain this is doable in Blender- I’ve done it in Maya with an option called “duplicate with transform” where you can select faces, edges or mesh sections, and specify a number of duplicates and a transform property, e.g. 60 degrees of rotation. FOr my design, I’d need to create one sixth of the cup and dupe it 6 times at 60 degree rotations, then presumably remove doubles to blend all six into one continuous mesh. Can anyone help me on the tool workflow to achieve this please? I looked up dupliverts but that’s not really what I want!

Thanks in advance

~P~

2

You should post in “support” section of the forums, probably modelling…

(this thread is likely to be moved there)

You cannot repeat a traslation/rotation combo like in maya…

You may want to try an array modifier using an “offset object”. That way you can rotate the offset object to do a radial type array…

You may also want to look at the Spin and spindup commands…

3

cool thanks again Michael W! How this forum runs if you’re around I cannot imagine :wink:

~P~

EDIT Looked up Spin Dup- this is exactly what I was after thanks! Next stop, duplication along a path…