How to add multiple meshes on the locations of the vertices of, for example, a sphere? (Adding them all at once)

Question

I want to add multiple meshes on the vertices of a single mesh. For example, I want to create a sphere mesh that consists out of vertices. Then I want to use the positions of those vertices to add new meshes of any kind of object.

My question, is this possible to do this all at once? Yes, how?

Answer 1

Add a particle system to the object and set it up to make particles being emitted only from vertices.

Set up particle system

2 objects are needed for particle system to work, one as emitter, and another to be emitted.

For Emitter:

Select emitter (sphere in your case), in Modifier Properties panel, add a Particle System for it.

A small ball (can be turned off) will appear near the emitter object to indicate it is a particle source, this ball is only visible in viewport, and will not be rendered

Go to Particle Properties panel, under Emission section:

• Leave it as Emitter
• Change Number corresponding to number of vertices in your emitter object. (How?)

You can see number of vertices of an object by entering edit mode, select all vertices by hitting a under vertex mode, and turn on Statistics under Viewport Overlays. See: Vertex count number display

• Turn off Random Order in Source section.
• Change Emit From to Vertices

Other parameter you should care: in the Velocity section and Physics section, you'd like to turn off physical simulation and set velocity to 0, to prevent object being emitted at unwanted location (at render time).

For Emitted Object:

Again in Modifier Properties panel, add a Particle Instance for the object being emitted:

• modify the Object property, to point to emitter (use the eyedropper tool to select the emitter)

Here the cube is translated to some location for better illustration, if you reset the translation of cube, the particles will be perfectly aligned:

Answer 2

DupliVerts

From the first lines of the Blender Manual's page about the topic:

Duplication Vertices or DupliVerts is the duplication of a base object at the location of the vertices of a mesh. In other words, when using DupliVerts on a mesh, an instance of the base object is placed on every vertex of the mesh.

Let's say we would like to create a cube centered in each vertex of a sphere.

Just parent (Crtl+P) the object to duplicate (child, must be selected first) to the object who has the vertices in the position you want (parent, must be selected last) and enable Verts option in the Duplication Panel of the last one:

To "bake" the geometry, call the Make Duplicates Real operator (shortcut Crtl+Alt+A)

Note: "baking" a massively duplicated geometry can make blender not responding for a long time, save your project before apply the duplication.

For a more recent version of blender:

Duplication Panel is renamed to Instancing, you can find it under Object Properties panel.

Answer 3

In Blender 3.0 (perhaps already in Blender 2.93...) you can use Geometry Nodes to achieve this effect: