You could texture them like that. If you wanted actual geometry, you could make your object "live" and draw a curve around it for the path of the rivets, then create one rivet and snap it to the curve. Then, you could set it to the curve as a motion path, then take an animation snapshot of it (setting the number of frames to the number of rivets you want).

They'd be evenly space though might need a bit of tweaking.

cheers

gubar