I want to create a very-surreal tunnel filled with identical animated clocks. I’ve built the clock, animated it, and placed all of the parts into a Group.
I then created an empty and specified “Group” on the Duplication menu … presto, now I’ve got an animated clock spinning there, too.
But what I want to do is to have a three-dimensional tunnel made of those clocks … without having to laboriously duplicate that empty and place the clocks one at a time. I’d like to be able to, say, create a mesh cylinder and specify that a group instance should be spinning at the location of each vertex in that cylinder, oriented along its normal-vector (facing inside). But “Group” duplication only works with objects and places only one duplicate there.
“Hope springs eternal,” so I tried using a small plane and then using the Array modifier, but when this is done I still see only one instance of the group, at the original location of the object.
Is there any easy way to get what I want? Yeah, I know that I could duplicate the empty, arrange the duplicates into a circle, then create more duplicates of all those to build a tube, but that’s going to be a lot more tedious work.
I thought about a Python script that would use a cylinder as a reference . . . creating linked duplicates at each point and with the proper rotation . . . but I haven’t managed to get it right yet.
If your clock is grouped, put a hair particle system on your cylinder choose the clock group as your object and if you want them a specific way you can weight paint where you want them to appear.
Well, so far what I’ve wound up doing seems to actually be working fairly well – I’m doing it by hand. I used a mesh circle, duplivert, and “make duplicates real” followed by “make single user” to create a ring of objects, then dupligrouped the clocks to each and adjusted the rotation of each one by hand to face inward. Then, I simply selected the ring and alt-D duplicated each one, sliding it vertically downward. Select two rings, repeat the process. Select four rings, repeat and so on.
I then decided that it looked better if I rotated every other such ring slightly, and scaled them to slightly different diameters, giving the arrangement a sort of “checkerboard spiral” look.
As I hoped and expected, the effect is very creepy and surreal.
Yes, I am using dupliverts … and what I’ve had to do is to arrange a set of empties into a ring, duplivert the clock onto each one, then make linked copies of that ring, hand-arranging them vertically. And it actually worked out okay because I found myself varying the arrangement a little more than I thought I would … scaling the clocks, and so on, to create a more three-dimensional cloud of clocks.
Every one of the clock empties is, of course, a duplivert of just one animated clock which is off-camera in the blend file.
(But now I’m thinking about duplicating that clock so that I can depict the clocks spinning at slightly different rates … we’ll see.)
It came out looking delightfully creepy, as I’ve said before. Just the thing for my lead actress to fall down through on her way from youth to old age …
