Positioning objects accurately in 3D

[pjskeldon]

I’m a 47-year-old mechanical engineering graduate and IT Manager, so perhaps I have the wrong mindset/skills, but I’m having difficulty positioning objects relative to one another.
One of my favourite characters is the recently revamped Dalek, and I have tried many times to model one to supplement what I’ve learned in training videos and tutorials.
However, the skirt and balls always defeat me.

I can loft the skirt as required, but placing the 56 balls at the right position and then surrounding each with a small ring/collar seems impossible, given the varying sizes and inclinations of the skirt panels.

Sure I could do a rough job by eye, but there must be some feature that allows precise location – like using a locator peg on a model kit part, or some sort of ‘snap-to’ function.

You’re probably laughing uncontrollably at my inexperience, but I have tried many approaches in trueSpace 6, Blender 2.48, Softimage 2010 and Maya 2008 without success.
What am I missing?

Help!

[Lovas]

Unfortunately I don't know what tutorials are you referring to but I know what a "standard" Dalek character look like.
I'm using Cinema 4D and there's a nice module there (MoGraph) that can be used to simply multiply objects over a surface so that every object is precisely centred on a polygon or on a vertex etc. so one can do the task with a few clicks.

If I didn't have the module or if I wanted for any other reason to use a "traditional" approach, I'd probably start by projecting a series of circular, horizontal, closed splines to the skirt surface (using the Project function that projects a spline onto a surface). If you are modelling a "standard" Dalek, you'll need four such splines at different heights and equal distance, as there are four rows of senseglobes on the skirt. Then I'd group the ring with a hemisphere into a hierarchy. In the next step I'd use the Duplicate function to duplicate the globe-ring group along each of the splines. One original and 13 instances for each spline are needed as the skirt has got 14 segments.

Hope it makes sense to you and you find a way to implement it in the software you prefer to use.

[Knight-Templar]

Check this out, All done in Cinema 4d, I don't know if you would have seen this but i think there great.
just click on each link for the video. The creator is a chap called Mick IMRIE
http://www.projectstreamer.com/users/mimrie/

Simon