Quick question about arrays

Blender Courses Talk
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1

So, I’m already past this point if the course but I thought this would be a good place to ask;

When you’re creating an array, is it possible to extend them in two directions at once? By which I mean, extending outwards from a central original mesh, rather than in one direction? I’ve come into a situation where I need symmetry, but the middle object (decorative studs along the middle of a shield, in this case) has to be precisely placed, so it’s more awkward to just extend outwards from one side, as the dimensions aren’t nice tidy numbers.

The obvious way is just to start from the middle, extend one side with an array, duplicate the end result, rotate by 180 degrees, join the meshes and remove doubles, but I was wondering if there’s a way to do it directly when creating the array, since that’s a bit long winded and slow?

Cheers.

2

You certianly can. However, when using array in a circular shape it doesn’t make a perfectly even distribution without further investigation. There are videos on youtube that can show you how to correct this. If symmetry is what you need though, you could always go with the mirror modifier as well. It is much more accurate for symmetrical meshes.

3

the array modifier will only project along a single Vector but that path can be manipulated with other modifiers. One thing you can do is apply a second array to project along the inverse of the original path. In terms of your project, this would allow your to create evenly spaced studs in both directions without all the duplicating and merging.