Maya - Duplicating an object along a path

I recently made this tutorial for another site and I thought I would post it here. Many thanks to Jordan for teaching us this last term.

Apologies for the crappy model. XD

First move the pivot point to where you want to rotate on your scale ('insert' to edit pivot and 'insert' again to get apply changes)



Snap your scale onto your curve.
Freeze Transformations and Delete your History.
Select your scale, then select your curve.



Go to the Animation Tab
Animate>Motion Path>Attach to Motion Path [option box]
For world type choose Normal. The End time will determine how many duplicates you will have.



Animate>Create Animation Snapshot [option box]
End time should be the same as previous
Increment should be 1. You can change increment if there are too many duplicates.



If you get this weird tapering issue where there's more duplicates in one area (like you can see here near the end) you can fix that in the Graph Editor.



First ctrl+z to undo the snapshot
Window>Animation Editors>Graph Editor

If you zoom out you can see a kind of curve on a graph.



Select the top point, then select the left bar on that point and middle mouse drag down so it looks like this.



This will fix that tapering issue. Now you can redo the snapshot.
Animate>Create Animation Snapshot [option box]
Duplicates will be evenly distributed.



Now you'll still have an animation to deal with. Simply select your original model and curve and delete! You can combine all your new scales (Polygon tab>Mesh>Combine) and make a new curve to do the same along a different direction.



Final results. Hope this helped!

This is so awesome!!! Thanks for posting this and making the steps easy to follow.

Oh yeah this is great, thank you!