How to lengthen a piece of a railing to fit around the radius of circle

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone!

Attempting to take a piece of railing and duplicate multiple times so it goes around the radius of cylinder. I am wondering if there is an easier way to do this than duplicating each piece of the railing again and again, while having to make sure each piece is angled and rotated the proper way so it fits in the same shape as the radius of the cylinder.

Thanks:

[brentmc · Accepted solution]

There are a number of ways to approach this in Maya.

The simplest way to speed up the duplicate process would be to snap your railing pivot to the center of the circle and then use the Edit > Duplicate Special smart transform feature as shown below. The rotation applied to the first duplicate is repeated each time you invoke Duplicate Special (Ctrl+Shift+D)

A more procedural approach would be to create a Mash network and then set the Distribute node to radial, and then tweak the number of duplicates and radius etc in the distribute node. You can also tweak the scaling and rotation of your original object when using Mash.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGCicxXhXZE

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Brent

[Anonymous]

This is great, thanks! I will try it out tonight when I get home. The 1st approach seems the simplest, as you mentioned.