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Looking for the Blender 2.49 version of this tutorial? Check out the archive.

            NOTE: In this tutorial, just like nearly all of my tutorials, I have provided what I call keystrokes lines. These are highlighted throughout the tutorial and are meant to allow you to see the actual keystrokes that I went through in order to get the results I get in the tutorial. More advanced users should be able to go through a tutorial without the keystrokes lines assuming I have explained myself sufficiently.

 

            Lately I have found myself wanting to make a string of repeatable items and that are evenly spaced. So, the first thing that I thought of doing was to go and use an array. Great! Arrays are perfect for a row of items but you need a bit more to make that row curved. I used to go through the process of setting up the array, applying the array, then moving a rotating each of the arrayed objects one by one. Eventually I got fed up with it and tried out a process I knew about (and should have taught myself much earlier...) but I had never actually done. Using curves are very helpful in doing this same sort of thing but is much easier to make look good and easier to edit. Below you can see the sort of thing I am talking about.

 

            To start making our curved pathway, remove the default cube if you have it. Once you have done that, we need to add a plane to use as one of the steps in our path. If you would rather use a different shape or you want to edit the plane, feel free to. The shape of the object should have no bearing on how this will work. All I did to my plane was scale it along the Y axis by a factor of 2.

 

            Add-->Mesh-->Plane; S; Y; 2

 

            Now we want to have the object repeat itself to create more than one step along our pathway. For this we use a modifier. To add a modifier to any object, we need to open up the modifier panel. You can find the button for this in the row of buttons on the right side. It looks like a little blue wrench. Once you are there, you should be able to see a dropdown button labeled 'Add Modifier'. The one that we need to select, 'Array', is under the generate column. When you have added the Array modifier, you should see a copy of the plane appear in the 3D viewing screen.

 

            Go to Modifier Settings, 'Add Modifier', Select Array

            To make our path way look correct, we need to change a few settings with the array modifier. There are only two settings that we are going to change. The first one is count. I changed this to 6. The second setting I changed was the relative offset in the x direction. I would like a gap between my steps, so instead of a setting of 1.000, I used 1.200. Below you can see where I am at so far.

            Change count to 6, Change relative offset in the x direction to 1.200

            Right now all we have is a straight path and that is pretty boring. To fix this we are going to make it curved. For the path to become curved we first need a path for our steps to follow. So, what we need to do is add a Bezier Curve to the scene. Once you have done that, go into edit mode and change it as much or as little as you like. I only suggest making it a big obvious curve so that you are completely sure that it is working correctly later on. You can see what I did with my curve below.

            Add-->Curve-->Bezier Curve, Edit your curve

 

 

            Now that we have the two pieces to make the curved array, all we need to do is add another modifier to the plane. Select the plane again and go back to the modifier settings. This time we will add a curve modifier. You can find this modifier in the second column labeled Deform. Initially, the modifier will do absolutely nothing. For it to work we need to tell the modifier what curve we want our array to follow. To do that, click in the text area below the object setting in the curve modifier settings. You should see a list of all of the items in the scene. Assuming that you did not change the name of the curve we added, it is probably just named curve. When you have selected the curve, the array should deform and being to follow along the curve.

 

            Select the plane, Go to the modifier settings, Add curve modifier, Select curve name in the Object field.

 

 

            That's all there is to it. However, this may not be exactly what we want. Let's say our curve is really long and we do not want to take the time to figure out how high of a count setting to make. To make it fit perfectly with the end of the curve we need to go back into the array modifier settings. You should be able to find a setting labeled 'Fit Type'. Currently it is set to Fixed Count. To make it fit to the length of the curve, we just need to change this setting to 'Fit Curve'. Another setting should appear below it once you do that and just like before all you need to do is select the name of the curve.

            Change 'Fixed Count' to 'Fit Curve', Input Curve name in the appearing field

 

 

Now you have an easily editable pathway. If you need to change the shape of the curve all you need to do is edit the curve. You don't even have to touch the plane unless you want to change the way the pathway itself looks.  As usual, I encourage you to just play around with settings in the stuff we went through in this tutorial.