Array modifier is scaling objects for seemingly no reason

Question

I'm somewhat new to blender (I've been using it for a few months but am still not fully comfortable with it). I'm trying to take a cylinder and duplicate it around an origin in a circular shape. I'm trying to get it to look something like this:

I looked up some tutorials on this, and they said to put an empty at the center of the rotation, and add an array modifier to the cylinder with "Object Offset" set to the empty. I did that, and instead of rotating around, the cylinders are getting scaled (it looks exponential). I'm not sure why this is happening. It's happened before but I wrote it off as some bad modifiers I applied earlier. But this is simply a cylinder and an empty. A screenshot of my setup and results is below:

It's kind of hard to see, but the empty is at the origin of the grid, inside the second smallest cylinder. The really small, thin cylinder is the one to which the modifier has been applied. Thanks!

Answer 1

The array modifier's object offset offsets each copy by the location, rotation and scale difference the object and the target, the empty in this case, have. You object has an uneven scale that is less than one, and since the empty has larger scale than the object, the object is scaled up for each copy. Hit CtrlA -> apply scale to set the object's scale to 1 on all axes and the scale won't change. Also for doing circle arrays, there should not be difference in location, else each copy of the object will also move by some offset. You can apply the location of the object as well to move the object's origin to the scene center.