Inward pointing cloud of objects...

[starbase1]

Hi All,
I have something I want to do, and I am not sure of the best way of doing it. What I want is a roughly spherical cloud of objects, in a loose shell. Something like two hundred of them. But I want each indiviual one to point at the centre of the cloud, (it does not have to be exact).

Cloning and jittering points in modeller and cloning to the points seems like a good way to get the arrangement, but only layout, as far as I know, will let me get them all point inwards.

Any suggestions?

There's got to be a better way than manually, surely!

Nick

[mattclary]

There may be a plugin somewhere to do this, but out of the box, I'd probably make succesive arrays to form half the sphere then mirror it. If a plugin doesn't exist, doesn't seem like it could be to hard to write. If only PointClonePlus had an "Orient to" setting...

[omeone]

Maybe you could try targeting them in Layout as you said, and using "Save Transformed..."

but then youd need to have all the objects on seperate Modeler layers...

or maybe powergons (http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/contests/dec-02/winners/tutorials/model/Leon_Chu/index.html) are the answer

[Simon]

There are loads of cloning plugins/scripts that can clone your object to the background poly normals (I use 'clonez' from Flay I'm not sure about pointcloneplus), so just make a sort of rounded shape roughly the shape you want the cloud to be, flip the polys and use that to clone to. All the cloned objects will align to the poly normals which would be pointing inwards. I think that sounds right!

Simon.

[starbase1]

Thanks Simon, Clonez sounds like exactly what I need - clonin to a normal sounded very odd at first, but a little thought showed it to be a cunning stunt!

Cheers,
Nick

[mattclary]

Originally posted by starbase1
a little thought showed it to be a cunning stunt!


A cunning stunt or a stunning cu..... never mind. ;)