Last time Eon made a UV sphere — a little planet. In this video he wants more planets. Not one or two. A whole galaxy of them: "like a hundred or thousands of millions of, okay, trillions of planets." You obviously can't build those by hand. So Eon learns the tool that does it for you: the array modifier.

First, the slow way (so you feel the pain)

Eon already knows how to copy an object. You hold Shift + D, move the mouse, and a duplicate appears — two spheres, a planet and its smaller moon. ("The moon is not the same size as planet Earth," he reminds his helper. "The moon is smaller.")

That works for one copy. But Eon makes you do it the hard way on purpose: to make three, you Shift+D, Shift+D again, and to undo a copy you select it, press X, and delete — "bam… and then do that again… BAM." After a few rounds he names the problem himself: "It's a kind of like labor — you have to put a lot of labor to do that. So we don't want to do that."

That feeling — this is too repetitive — is the whole point. It's the same signal he met back in coding: when you're repeating yourself, there's a better tool.

The smart way: add a modifier

A modifier modifies the object. You don't rebuild the sphere — you add a rule on top of it that says "now do this to it."

Eon adds the array modifier (he has fun with the name: "It's array. Not hooray. It's kind of like hooray, but it's array"). The moment it's on, there are three copies. Then he just types a number. Eight? "Oh my goodness" — eight spheres in a line. A hundred? They get so small and so many he has to zoom out and pan the camera to see them all. And the magic trick: to undo all hundred, you don't delete anything — you type 1 and press Enter, and you're back to a single sphere. No counting, no clicking.

That's the lesson: with an array modifier you input a number instead of clicking and dragging copies. As Eon puts it, "you're not using click and drag… you just input a number."

Offset: which way do the copies go?

A row is just the start. Each copy is placed by an offset, and the offset has three values — X, Y, and Z. Eon points out the X offset is 1 while Y and Z are 0, so the copies only "extend here" along the red X axis. So he changes the Y offset to 1 as well — now the copies fan out in two directions at once. Changing which axis carries the offset changes the whole shape.

Then comes the real trick: stacking modifiers. Eon takes his row of five, applies the array modifier so the whole row becomes "one thing," like an egg. Then he adds a second array modifier on top — count 5, offset 0 on X but 5 on Z — and that single egg gets copied upward. A line became a grid; the grid became a tower. He compares the build-up to molecules and atoms, then to a skyscraper.

Going crazy (and finding the limit)

Naturally Eon pushes it. The count climbs by tapping the number up one at a time — six, seven, eight, nine, ten levels — "I don't need to count, it's already 10." Then he goes for 5,000, doing the place value out loud: 500 already has two zeros, so to reach 5,000 you add one more zero. He presses Enter and the program lags. "I think it could break my computer." The tower becomes a monster skyscraper, his sphere standing tiny at its foot.

Here's the big idea behind the fun: this is procedural generation. The computer isn't storing 5,000 hand-placed spheres — it's following the rule to generate them. Eon makes the comparison perfectly: a creator he watches spent about three hours counting 3,000 Cheerios by hand. With a modifier you "use the power of mathematic" — type the number, done. Push past what the machine can compute (he jokes about 7,000) and that's when it breaks, not because the idea is hard.

And he never loses the plot: "Remember, we set out to make the moon" — the array modifier is the tool he'll use to get there next time.

Try it

You want a row of 8 fence posts. Place 8 by hand… or place one and add an array modifier set to "8." Now try what Eon did: keep the count at 8 but change the Y offset from 0 to 1 — watch your row turn into a patch. Then imagine applying it and adding a second array going up the Z axis. How many posts do you have now without placing a single extra one by hand? That's procedural generation — you describe the pattern, the computer does the counting.