How to Use Dupliverts in Blender

GreyBeard’s Blender Tutorials Tutorial No. 3 Using Dupliverts Welcome to GreyBeard’s Blender Tutorials, this is my 3rd tutorial and it’s on using Dupliverts. Now, what are Dupliverts? Well, Dupliverts are Blender’s version of an array command. What it does is it places an object at every vertex of a mesh that we call an emitter. You create your middle mesh and at every vertex on that mesh their will be a copy on that object placed. Now, Dupliverts also give you some control over the orientation of the Dupliverted objects and later they can be converted to regular meshes that you desire to do so. Now, some general strategies for using Dupliverts. Dupliverts are pretty straight forward but a couple of things you might want to think of when you are creating the object to be Dupliverted you should note the directions of the local axis of the objects since this are use to align the Dupliverted object later. You should also make sure that the local axis of the emitter and the world axis are the same if you plan on using the real option. This will become clear later. And on the modeling part of the tutorial, here is our typical blender start up screen. I am going to go into full screen mode control apparel. Here we are and I am going to zoom in. I am going to use this queue. I am going to the front view and tab and edit mode. B box select the top vertices, that is the sixth scale hold down the Control key and bring it all the way to zero, W, remove our doubles. I am going to select all the vertices and S for scale, X for the error correction and I am going to grab all our vertices and hold down the control key and move them up. And you can see we have our object that we are going to a Duplivert. Now, let us create our emitter mesh. So, I am going to top view and I will add the mesh, just a plane, I will scale it up a little bit here with the S key, W, let us subdivide it once, subdivide it again and tab out. Now, select your object that you want Dupliverted. Hold down the shift key and then select your perimeter. Press Control+P and make the emitter be parent. Now, we are going to just tab our emitter selected and we are going to go down into the buttons window so I will get out of full screen mode and will go into the object buttons. And I will zoom in on those and over on the far left here under Animation settings, you will notice there is a Dupliverts button which has duplicate child objects in all vertices and now I will press that button, remember it is the emitter that we have selected. And you will notice that there is a copy of our object placed at every vertex if we tab in and out at every vertex an object is being copied. Now, we select our original object and rotate that, you will notice that all of our objects rotate so we can see how it is done. Now, on the simple example to conclude our first little example here, I am going to make these objects real. Now, with the emitter selected, you hold down the Shift+Control and Press A, and it says make duplies real. You can also get that from object and Clear/Apply, there is a make duplies real command here as well so I will use this one this time. And now we can select our emittering again and grab it and you will notice it along with its child object. We can erase them now since we do not need them anymore. And we have an array of our objects. I will zoom in with that. Now for a slightly more complicated example, I will start off, New again, go into front view and I am going to make that same object again. B for Box. S for Scale. Hold down the Control key, scale to zero. W, remove doubles. Select all our objects. S for scale. X for the X-direction. G for Grab. Hold down the Control key and we have got our original object again. Now, I am going to go into top view and I am going to add a mesh and we are going to add a circle this time to say 12 vertices. I am going to scale, line up and just like before, select our object that we want duplicated. Then our emitter mesh, Control+P, make parent, select our emitter and mesh, go to our Object buttons, I will zoom in again, select Dupliverts and you can see there is one copy one copy at each vertex. Now, you generally want something like this, you want it to follow the circle rather than be like this. Now a circle even though it has not got two faces, it does have normals. And this normals point outwards from the center. They radiate outwards. That is the normals of a circle. So what we can do in order to do that is with our emitter mesh selected we will go back down into our buttons, you will notice there is the rotation object thing, the rotation button here and it says rotate duplicates according to the phase normal and if we select that as well, when we go up, we will notice that our objects are all rotated around in our circular fashion the face normals now. If we select our objects here and I am going to turn on the axis for that object, that is the axis button here. I am going to show how you can use this axis to control the orientation of these objects. Now, you will notice right now, we have the long side of the cube which is the Y-axis, is going out and the Zed-Axis which points to the pointy part, is pointing up, if you see what I mean. So now, let us look at -- well, we have our object selected, we will go back into the buttons window and we will go back to the Animation buttons here, we are still in the objects button and you will notice that the Y-axis is the axis that points along the normal points along the normal and this Zed-Axis is pointing up. So now if we use the X instead you will notice that they are arrayed in a different orientation, in this case like before the X-axis point along the normals and the Zed-Axis point up. So, let us see what happens if we press the Zed-Axis then you will notice that the Zed-Axis points along the normals but if we zoom in here and I go into solid mode, you know it is all kind of what we wanted and the reason for that is we have the -- if we go into our buttons windows here again and take a closer look, you will see that we have Zed-Axis pointing along the normals but we also have the Zed-Axis pointing up and it is confused, it does not really know what to do so we have to select one of the other axis to point in the up direction. So let us do, up X, and we will see what happens. And you can see the X-axis which is along the wider thing will be pointing upwards. And if we did the Y-axis you will notice they will flip the other way. So you can see how you can use this buttons here to control how our object is oriented according to face normals. If -- click others, the zed button, we have the rotation button selected on out emitter. Now, I am going to do another example, a quick example and this time I am going to make an error and show you what can go wrong and how you might get confused. So, we are going to start with a new object, a new screen and I am going to erase our box and I am going to add a mesh, I am going to add a cylinder. 12 vertices are fine. We are going to front view, A for all, B for box, S for scale, hold down the control key, W, remove doubles, A for all, B for box, I am just going to scale this a bit, I am going to grab it and select all the vertices, grab them, hold them up and you will see we got a nice little spike here. So now I am going into front view and I am going to add a mesh and I am going to add an Icosphere, so division 2, let us turn off shading here and I am going to scale this quite a bit bigger and I am going to -- like before select our object first and then our emitter Control+P to parent item, to parent -- the emitter, the parent. Now we will go back into our object buttons and select Dupliverts and Rot. Now, we will go to here, to our emitter again -- to our button again and I am going to press S this time. You have got our object selected. When I go in here you will notice that there does not seem to be a way that I can make this things point in the right direction. What have we done wrong and I see this mistake, a lot of new comers make this mistake like there is -- there forever clicking this track buttons and they are not working and the do not understand how they work. What has happen is, our original emitter, if we go into a non-shaded view and I am going to turn Dupliverts off for now. Our original emitter if we draw the axis of that emitter you will notice that the axis of the emitter do not line up with our world axis. The Zed is pointing where the Y-ax -- to the negative Y-axis and the X-axis is pointing the right direction and the Y-axis is pointing in the direction of the positive Zed-Axis and this is what is confusing the whole situation. So, what we have to do is make the world coordinance the same as the local coordinance for our emitter. So, what we will do is press Control+A, and we will apply size and rotation. Now, this is also available through the object menu, we can do object, apply size and rotation. Okay, now because our object was already parented, it is tilted but that is okay it did -- it does not matter, we can clear the parent, Alts+P, clear parent and parent it again, Control+P, make parent. And now when I turn on the Dupliverts, now we go back into our buttons for or tracking, if we track Zed, you will notice that they are all pointing out. Now, you will notice that I am going to turn on the axis drawing for that, you will notice that the Zed-Axis is now pointing out in the direction of the normal and you can see down here we have got the Zed-Axis pointing in the direction of the normal. It does not matter if we have an extra Y pointing up because it is a symmetrical object. So, that is one thing that you should really take note of this. You should apply the size and rotation of your emitter if you plan on using the rotation object. So now, let us -- Zed, we can see what that looks like, this are the spiked objects. Okay, we select the emitter again Control+Shift+A and we will make our duplies real. Now we can grab our emitter, I will zoom out, grab, move it out of the way and we can get out of this. I will erase these two objects, 7, add a mesh, a UVsphere, let us scale it up and we are going to subdivided once. Take out double sided, set smooth and Zed and we have our nice spiked ball. That is basically all there is to learn about Dupliverts. I just a -- and hopefully I have shown you a couple of pitfalls that can happen if you use them incorrectly. Thank you for listening. The next tutorial is going to be on Dupliframes and that will cover both of the dupli objects and blender. Thanks for listening. I hope you will watch my next tutorial as well.