How to snap an object to a surface many times

[Anonymous]

Hey Guys,
I'm new to Maya. I've worked with Blender in 4 years, and want to switch to Maya, because it's mainly used in the industry.
I have a problem: I've modelled an airplane in Maya, and to make it more realistic I want to place steel plates on top of the surface. At the Edge of each plate I want to place a row of bolts, like in the images below. I Blender you can take an object, activate "snap to faces" and some other settings, and then it snaps to the surface of another object, and rotates based at their normals. I know there is a feature in Maya called "Snap Together Tool", and it kind of do what I want. But I have to put a lot of screws on the plates, so this takes forever. Is there a way, that I can duplicate an object, take it, and I automatically snap to the surface and rotate based on the normals?

The other way I've discovered is, to make the selected object live. When I move an object on top of the surface, it snaps to the object, but does not rotate based on the normals.

I hope you understand, what i want. Sorry for my bad English, it is not my native language 🙂

[sean.heasley]

Hi @mr-malt and welcome to the community!

I believe the easiest way to do this would be via Motion Trails.

I went ahead and made a quick tutorial about how I would go about doing this with a similar model like the one in your screenshot

Please let me know if this helps or if you need any more assistance!

If one or more of these posts helped answer your question, please click Accept as Solution on the posts that helped you so others in the community can find them easily.

Kudos are greatly appreciated. Everyone likes a thumbs up!

[mspeer · Accepted solution]

Hi!

I recommend to use MASH, it's a bit more versatile because of it's procedural structure:

https://vimeo.com/album/4046248/video/205893961

[Anonymous]

Thank you very much. This is exactly what i was looking for 🙂