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Blender rotateing an array

Hey guys!

I'm looking to create the fibres on a toothbrush (fun eh?). At the moment I've decided to use a low-res mesh cylinder to produce the fibres. I looked into using particles/hair, but they're effected by gravity and have a nasty habbit of overlapping each other which looks a bit weird - if you care to grab toothbrush and have a look, you might understand what I'm on about ;o) . An avreage brush head has little circles of fibres arranged in rows down the lenght of the head.

Anyhoo, I'm currently trying to to use a modiffier array first off to create a length of fibres, then another array to rotate/spin the buch around an empty - using the offset in the panel. So far I'm getting nowhere. It seems so unpredictable, unlike the odd explanations I've seen online. Most of the time, soon as I add an Empty, the cylinder/fibres/object gets scalled for each duplicate.

Has anyone got any clues of what steps to create this? I'm not fussed about the whole head, just the initial bunch of fibres out of one hole - after that's sorted, I can use an array to multiply them in the desired directions.

Course, if anyone has any brighter ideas, you're more than welcome to say - options are open, even particles/hair if you know how to stop them overlapping.

I'm using blender 2.49a and 2.5 Alpha, so if you could cater your suggestions to one of those versions it will make it easier for me to understand.

Oh yeah, and the brush head will be quite close to the camera, so this needs to look reasonably right :o)

Cheers in advance!

Answers

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maybe a little picture explains what i did

the initial circle of cylinders is controlled by an offset/and rotated empty 45° (use N key to input exact numbers)

hope it inspires you :)

in the 2nd picture, there is an array laying out 3 cylinders before circling them with e (which just controls the rotation to form a circle) to position the individual cylinders MOVE the array eg adjust the first array to have 4 instead of 3 cylinders, no just move the array till everything is alined :)

first example blend tooth_brush.blend

second example blendtooth_brush1.blend

or create a minibush first (right) and rotate it afterwards (left) :)

third test tooth_brush2.blend

deleted your other answer matey, hoping to make it so you can delete your own soon! thanks for getting involved - great answer..
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could not resist to try it with partikles using an OBJECT (hair) as the partikel visualization and particles on every vertex on a circular object

turned out be quite nice and controllable

happy brushing and blending :)

particle brush

finally used another object (distorted palne) with dupliverts to aline the bush objects

Yep, I did that after trying the array. Hair turned out easier than I thought for it and was a lot more controlable.

I used a simple 8 pointed emitter for the base and used the normal for length, only needed around 100 fibres per hole. Then just did an Alt-D to copy/reference to create the rows and spans. Changed ever second row for a different colour - worked a treat, and rendered quick too! :o)

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