If you have ever seen the Dupliverts tool in Blender, this free MEL script from Jesse Nelson does just that only for Maya.
“This script will duplicate a selected object or objects, and automatically move them to a second specified target object’s vertices. It is based on the idea of the “dupliverts” tool in Blender 3D, though no code was taken from that program. Also, instead of just creating instances of the object like Blender does, this script actually creates and groups an entire set of duplicated objects! Tested on Windows XP and Mac OSX 10.5, but hopefully should work fine on other versions as well as Linux.”
FEATURES:
- ability for multiple “child” objects per parent object
- support for randomization of scale, rotation, and translation (including ability to limit randomization of certain translation axies)
- ability to specify percent coverage of duplication onto “parent” object’s vertices
- ability to align specified axies of child object to “parent” object’s normals
- ability to name output objects and group
- poly or nurbs objects can be duplicated