I created a string of pearls by modifying the hotweels racetrack path and multireplicating a sphere to it. I modified the path for 3D. Then I created the sphere and set up the materials. I clicked on the attributes button for the sphere and set the linking as shown in the window. When I entered 0.0 for the position and checked constrtain to path the sphere automatically snapped to the start of the path. I went up to the top menu and used multi replicate from the edit pulldown. Supposedly alt+shift+D works too. I set the quantity to 35 and checked the scale translation button. This was too few so I hit undo and upped the number till it looked better. Because the original sphere was constrained all the duplicates are locked to the path. Selecting a sphere and sliding the mouse left or right causes it to move from the beginning to the end of the path. This is a good thing because the spacing varies with the distance between each of the blue control points along the path and it's almost impossible to get these even. I over duplicated and deleted some out of the middle and slid others around till it looked right.