Introduction: If you’ve ever looked at one of your models and thought, “This is the most boring object I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” it’s probably time to eat a Snickers bar. And when you’re finished with the Snickers bar, you might want to consider adding a little repetition and variation to your model. Often times, implementing this fundamental design principal can mean the difference between a dull object and a really interesting one. Lightwave comes with a wonderful tool called Point Clone Plus, which is great for adding repetition and variation. Unfortunately, it clones objects around points. What about those times, however, when you want your object cloned onto polys (as in the image below)?  In these instances, you need to turn to a plug-in. While there are a number of cloning plug-ins out there, one of my favorites in terms of speed and ease of use has to be SP Clone LE. We’re going to take a fairly in-depth look at this plugin. While it’s not really difficult to use, there are a few key principles you’ll need to understand if you want to get predictable results. So grab a soda and some munchies and let’s walk through the use of this cool plugin together. If it’s not already running, fire up Modeler and add SP Clone LE. In the first layer, create a box. In the second layer, create a sphere, about 1/4 to 1/8 the size of the box. You don’t need to be exact. Just eyeball it. The image below shows the box in the foreground and the sphere in the background. In order for SP Clone LE to work as expected, we need to make sure that the object we want to clone is centered at the origin. In this excercise, we’ll be cloning the sphere, so go to its layer and click on the Modify tab. Then click on the Center tool. Your sphere should position itself around the origin at 0,0,0. See the image below. With the sphere object now centered, go back to your box layer. Make it the foreground and put the sphere in the background. The last thing we need to do is identify which poly we want our sphere cloned to. In your perspective view, select the poly on top of the box, then run SP Clone LE. You should end up with something similar to the image below. Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: Woo and hoo. It copied the sphere onto the box. Yippie. All that work for this? Yep. But trust me, my friend, it gets so much better. Before we get to the good stuff, however, we need to take a closer look at what’s actually happening. If you examine the image above, you’ll notice a few things: First, you can see that SP Clone LE took a copy of the background object and placed it into the foreground layer. It did not, however, delete the background object. That’s a good thing. It’s a feature, not a bug. Second, you can see that the sphere is perfectly aligned with the normal of the poly we selected. This is an important thing to consider. While it wasn’t specifically designed for it, SP Clone LE can be used to quickly and easily align objects. Third, you can see that the sphere is located at the center of the poly we selected. This, too, is an important thing to take note of. Now, you may be wondering why the sphere ended up partly above and partly below the box instead of simply resting on top of it. At least, that’s what I was wondering when I first ran the plugin. You may be some sort of uber-genius and are already way ahead of me. Lucky genius bastards, you make me sick! For the rest of us, however, who are simply trying to get by on our average IQs, here’s the scoop. SP Clone LE determines where it should place the cloned object by looking at the background layer’s X,Y,Z coordinates. In this case, the sphere was perfectly centered. If you go back and look at the image above, you’ll notice that one half of the background sphere lies above, and the other half lies below, the 0 coordinate on the Y axis. And that’s just how it ended up when we cloned it. Half was above the poly and half was below. In essence, SP Clone LE treated the selected foreground poly as a virtual ground plane! When you ran the plugin, it copied the background object, aligned it to the selected poly’s normal, and positioned it on the selected poly in correspondence with its original position in the background layer. Now that’s cool! Okay. Having the sphere centered on the foreground poly was nice, but it’s not what I wanted. Let’s correct this so that when we run the plugin again, the ball will rest on top of the box. As I mentioned earlier, SP Clone LE looks at the background object’s position to determine where it should place the foreground clone. Therefore, in order to get the ball on top of the box, we must position it above the 0 coordinate on the Y axis. You could do this by simply moving the ball up, but a more accurate way is to use the Aligner tool. Go back to Modeler and hit Undo. The clone should disappear. Now select the Sphere layer and make it the foreground. Click on the Modify tab, find the Aligner tool and click it. A window will pop up similar to the one in the image below. The Aligner tool should be set to World mode. This ensures that your foreground object will be aligned to Modeler’s origin at 0,0,0. Since SP Clone LE also uses the origin as it’s reference point, that’s the system we need to use. Aligner gives us the ability to set each axis independently, and for each, there are several choices: Off. Pretty self explanitory. This will result in no alignment. C. This will center your object around the 0 coordinate for the selected axis. Setting X, Y, and Z to C will result in the object being perfectly centered at the origin (which is where it’s at now). -. This will position your object on the negative side of the 0 coordinate for the selected axis. Sheesh! Was that confusing enough for you? Basically, if you set the X axis to - and leave everything else at Off, your object will jump to the left side of the origin. Capisca? +. This will position the foreground object so that it is on the positive side of the 0 coordinate for the selected axis. Yes, my geometry teacher would be proud! :) Ok, since the ball is already centered, we don’t really need to adjust the X and Z coordinates. We’re mainly concerned with getting the ball to rest on the ground. To do this, set the X and Z to C (just in case) and the Y to +. Then click OK. Your ball should end up centered on the X and Z (it was probably there already) and be on the positive side of the Y axis, making it look as if it’s resting on the ground. Oy vey! What a mouthful. It sounds more confusing than it really is. Check out the picture below. With the ball now resting on the ground, let’s put SP Clone LE back into action. Go to your box layer. Make it the foreground and the sphere your background. Select the poly on top of the box again, then run SP Clone LE. You should end up with something similar to the image below. That’s better! The sphere remains perfectly aligned with the poly’s normal, but now it’s also centered left to right and front to back, in addition to resting right on top of the box. Okay, you’ve hung in there with me through the boring stuff (thank you!). At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of how SP Clone LE works. Now let’s take a look at a more practical application for this plugin. So far, we’ve seen that SP Clone LE is a nice little tool for aligning a background object to a foreground poly. For this reason alone it’s pretty useful. But its real power comes from the ability to align and position multiple objects simultaneously. Let’s see how this might play out in a real-world situation. Suppose you’ve created a really cool Orc character and now it’s time to give him a weapon. You’ve settled on a large morning-star, but, you’re not content with simply placing a few measly spikes on it. No sir. You want this bad boy to be covered with pointy barbs. You’ve modeled the the pole and chain, but now it’s time to cover the ball with spikes and you’re scratching your head trying to find out the easiest way to get it done. As with any modeling challenge, there are several solutions. You could create a cone, rotate it by hand, and try to position it so that it’s aligned with the surface of the ball. After the 5th or 6th time you did this, however, the tedium would likely kill you. Another option would be to run Point Clone Plus. Unfortunately, Point Clone Plus doesn’t align its clones, so you’d once again you’d be stuck rotating each one by hand. What you really need is something that will line the spikes up to individual polys, as they are perfectly flat. This, friends, is where SP Clone LE comes in. In the following exercise, we’ll use SP Clone LE to quickly place spikes on our morining-star model. Let’s go back to Modeler and start a new project. Create a large sphere in one layer and a small cone in another. You don’t need to be exact, but the proportions should be roughly similar to those in the image below. When we run SP Clone LE, it’s going to place copies of the cone onto the polys we select. However, if you’ll notice, the polys that make up the top and bottom of our sphere are smaller than the ones around the center. That means that our spike will overlap any polys that are smaller than its diameter. While this isn’t a major crisis, it could give the appearance that the spike is not attached to the ball, and that’s bad. To prevent this, we should probably position the cone just below the surface of the ball. That way, it will always poke through and not just rest on the surface of the polys we select. Make sense? Alrighty then. To set up our spike for cloning, we need to position the bottom of the cone so that it rests slightly under the 0 coordinate on the Y axis. Go ahead and make the cone your foreground layer, click on the Modify tab, and run Aligner. We’ll use it to rest the spike on the ground, then manually move it down a bit. Set the X and Z axis to C (Center). That way the spike will be centered around the selected polys’ normals. Then set the Y axis to +. The Aligner interface should look like the image above. Now hit OK. You should end up with something similar to the image below. With the spike centered, activate the Move tool (t) and using your middle mouse button (or holding down the control key), drag the spike down slightly. How much is really up to you, but as you can see in this screen shot below, I didn’t move mine that much. Just enough to be on the negative side of the Y axis. Now for the fun part! Put your sphere in the foreground and your spike in the background. Go ahead and select some polys on your sphere. Remember, for each poly you select, you’re going to get a spike. You can select any or all of the polys if you’d like. I selected mine randomly because I want my Orc to have a good chance of inflicting pain no matter what part of the ball he hits you with. :) Below is a screengrab with about 30 polys selected. When you’re happy with your poly selection, simply run SP Clone LE. Viola!!! Your spike will be copied, aligned, and positioned to all the selected polys in one fell swoop. Now that, my friends, is super-cool! SP Clone LE isn’t one of those tools that you’ll use every time you run Modeler, but when the need arises, it’s absolutely indispensable. It provides a quick and easy way to align objects to polys, and is great for adding details such as studs, buttons, grommits, teeth, etc. to your characters. While there aren’t many limitations, SP Clone LE it isn’t completely without want. It does lack the variation settings you’ll find in a tool like Point Clone Plus or even Clonez. As such, there are no controls to vary the scale, position, or rotation of your source object. Fortunately, however, it does leave your background object intact. If you wanted a little variation, you could select a few polys, run the plugin, tweak the background object, and repeat the process. That’s a workaround, though, and it would be nice to see this plugin developed a little further to offer those options. Well, that’s about it. We’ve spent a lot of time looking at a fairly straightforward and simple tool, but I hope I’ve given you a good understanding of how useful this plugin can truely be. Cheers!