I am a lazy Artist. 

There. You have it. The truth. 

In a job interview, you might hear potential candidates smile and nod eagerly, insisting that they are hard workers; that they can grind HAPPILY through any monotonous and repetitive task without so much as a whimper - all to seal the deal and get the job. But lets face it, very few creatives actually like doing something monotonous and repetitive. Not to bash anyone who is fond of meditative trans-like states, but when the whir of fire burns inside to create - and I mean not just "make" but really CREATE -  a calm zen mindset can be a pretty jarring and counter-intuitive state to be in for many of us.  So lets be completely honest, I'll be the first to admit: "I am a lazy Artist."

You might think its a bad thing...

...and understandably, as our society has come to associate laziness with lethargy. But a lazy person is not necessarily lethargic. It simply means that we are made intolerant of inefficient behavior. In other words, if channeled properly, lazy can be a good thing.

Mind you, when it comes down to it and there is no other way, many times have I sat down through days, even weeks of doing a repetitive task so as to over come a certain stage in the creative process. For instance, I recently had a client that wanted a sculpted toy dragon for an up coming toy expo. He is a very detail oriented client with the highest standards in precision. 

So as a Lazy person, I weighed my options: 

Tilable displacement maps converted to geometry, or, duplicating and arranging each scale one by one? After some careful thought and consideration, I decided to go with the latter and add each scale one by one on the dragon.

The reasons? Several. First of all, tilable texture scales are great but for something that is going to be appreciated up close in a very tactile way... lets just say I am lazy but not THAT lazy. Wherever possible, quality comes first. I could have gone down the multi Nano-mesh route in ZBrush, but seeing as this is a decimated sculpt and I needed a variety of scale sizes, there is no predicting how this arrangement would show (likely very sloppy). Thirdly, my vision for this particular project was to make the little dragon blossom with his scales, meaning the scales were added on very much like a flower arrangement ( thank you 4 years working part time in a flower shop to pay for University!) But, honestly, if there was a way to wave a magic wand and skip all of that toil, I'd be the first one to reach for it. And this is the whole point of this article. 

Lazy people are motivated to be efficient workers. 

They do not simply get to work, they pause for a moment and consider the fastest route towards reaching a goal without compromising on quality. Lazy people are the first to learn scripting for instance, the motivation being that the evening they spend hacking out code is worth the countless times they will encounter a similar problem in the future with a solution at hand ready to solve it in minutes. And for those of us who are even smarter, we might try googling for a pr-existing script first! No sense in re-inventing the wheel, right?

So for my next project. I had setup a scene of a crash site. The objective being that I would create a plane crash scene that is so believable, my own mother could never tell its CG. In other words, fidelity is key. So as I setup my scene, slapped on some scanned assets real quick just to set the mood of the scene and placed my plane model, I began to think about how I was going to tackle this particular project. 

Since this is mostly a texturing exercise, I chose a WWII Flying Fortress bomber plane to make the most of those gritty textures. As I compiled reference images, I quickly realized I needed a strategy. War era bomber planes had crude bolted paneling. Meaning that every panel is bolted down along its periphery.  

So I found a script. One that could not only quantitatively duplicate meshes along a curve, but also ascertain their size, position, and spacing. Score! As I went to search for lines along the plane which I could add bolts to, I realized that unfortunately, in my case, the plane model I am using is full of triangles and ziltch on edge-loops (of course!) which could have been beneficial for lining up the bolts.  

Okay, no sweat. We regroup our thoughts and adapt.

Instead I got creative with some live linking and curves. In the end, it was actually a bit of a side bonus to use curves as it lent to a more hand-made approach, what with the slight wobbles and imperfections that you wouldn't get from a perfect edge loop ( + 1 fidelity! )

An hour later, and boom! Roughly 10,000 bolts, give or take some (I am too lazy to count them ;) ) and of course, brought to you by a lazy artist.

You're welcome.

Looking for the script? You can download it from the old school geniuses here: https://www.highend3d.com/maya/script/duplicate-along-path-for-maya

I should mention though that if you are going to tackle a large amount of duplicate meshes, instancing is a much more memory efficient method, so if that is the route you wish to go, I found an alternative script that creates instances here (just make sure to delete the history as you go!) : https://github.com/mmerchante/instanceAlongCurve