I don’t think I’ve ever had success with dupliverts, but I know what I’m trying to do can be done. Maybe I’m just missing something… Well, anyway, I’ve made a leaf and I’d like to get it to go around the trunk (the grey thing in the middle) enough to hide the upper part of it. So, I’ve made another mesh that is basically a circle of vertices. The leaf mesh is parented to the circle mesh, and the circle mesh object has “dupliverts” and “rot” turned on.
It didn’t change anything. I’m not quite sure that a vertex can logically be rotated, since it’s only a point. However, the direction changes when edges reverse directions. That doesn’t help me in this situation, though.
It would be nice to see the actual duplivert settings or .blend file, but if I had to guess, you might just need to play with the up-axis and track settings.
Ah, there we go. Your normals got screwed up in modelling the circle. It looks like they were calculated from the mesh ‘center’, which was placed at the base of the original leaf. Thus, all the other leaves pointed away from that point. The solution is actually easy:
Select the real leaf and press Alt + P to unparent it. Select the ‘keep transformation’ option so it doesn’t go anywhere.
Select the circle, go under the edit buttons and hit ‘center new’. The pink dot should jump into the middle of the circle.
Press tab to enter edit mode. Select all the vertices and hit Ctrl + N, then click ‘recalc normals outside’. This will make the normals at each vertex point like you’d expect them to.
Now go back to object mode and re-parent the leaf and go through dupliverts again. You can turn on ‘draw axes’ to make it easier to see what track buttons need to be pushed, but track Y and up Z should get it just fine.
