
How To Make Rotational Arrays In Blender
Duplicating the petal object and rotating it around the Z axis doesn’t work right away, however this is fixed by setting the 3D cursor to the centre of the scene and change the pivot point to the 3D cursor. I will rotate the petals on the Y axis in order to stop them intersect with one another.
Over on the course we have many students asking great questions. Often the topic they’re talking about is covered in the course but not specific enough for their task.
Alec wanted to know how to do a rotational array… so here we go!
First of all we’ll open up Blender and delete the default cube and add a plane.
Grabbing the vertices we can move them to form a petal shape, feel free to experiment with different shapes!
Next we need to move the base of the petal to the centre of our scene for ease of rotating.
Selecting the base of the petals vertex and holding SHIFT S, we can move the 3D cursor to the vertex.
Now let’s make the Array of petals.
In the properties window, add a modifier of type Array.
We want to turn off relative offset and turn on object offset. However we don’t have an object to offset to!
We need to make what’s called an empty. It will affect our model, but won’t be visible in the scene.
I am going to use a Plain Axes, so in object mode, and with the 3D cursor in the centre of our scene I will add and empty.
There we go we have a rotational array. It would be good if we could improve on the model just to finish it off.
Let’s start by making our petals a little more rounded by adding a subdivision surface modifier.
Once done, I want a second set of petals behind the original and slightly larger.
However, if you just scale whilst in object mode some weird stuff happens! This isn’t desirable in this case.
A couple of final touches like a sphere for the middle of the flower.
Turning on smooth shading on to finish our model.
Excellent we have out flower and have leant about rotational arrays.
Let me know how you got on in the comments.