Animatable pivots...

[j-man]

I think the normal proceedure for having some kind of animated pivot is to link the object to a dummy, and then you can animate both the object and the dummy giving the same effect.


Josh.

[eek]

Err, thats a floating pivot. I have a few of them in the scene. I want to be able to offset a pivot of an object, eg like bipeds animatable foot pivot.

eek

[j-man]

you cannot animate a pivot. you can animate vertices though so maybe you are barking up the wrong tree...:>

J.

[marktsang]

j-man you cannot do it directly but there are certainly work arounds .....

[PEN]

Kees pulled it off in PuppetShop so if you have an old cut of that you can see the way that he dealt with it. I have done similar things as well. You can't directly animate the pivot of an object and I think that any attempt to do so will fail. I actualy set it up so that I could just drop a modifier on the object and it would setup the multipivot for me with tools to work with it. I need to go back and work on it some more now that we have some new features in Max 8 that will help the process.

[j-man]

j-man you cannot do it directly but there are certainly work arounds .....

LOL Hi mark, yes this is what I'm implying. Animate a transform and the vertices together and you have an amimated pivot.

Paul, Im looking forward to this!

Josh.

[PEN]

LOL Hi mark, yes this is what I'm implying. Animate a transform and the vertices together and you have an amimated pivot.

Paul, Im looking forward to this!

Josh.

Don't hold your breath, as it is "One my list"

[eek]

you cannot animate a pivot. you can animate vertices though so maybe you are barking up the wrong tree...:>

J.

Err I posted that in my first post!! talking about using mesh offset and not pivot pos.:rolleyes: Anyway hey guys thx for your input, yes well im looking into lots of areas. A modifier is the way to go, currently im building a generic'ish rig, just to animate with. Ive taken off stretch, but bend bones are in plus all the fk/ik rigmaral!

Mark blurted out xform so i gave that a go - in a way it works. So im gunna go further with the modifier system. I'll propably start tearing my hair out, and banging my head on the ground, most of my ideas come this way.

It's just quite a nice addon, I know a lot of the studios have this system but AP's are like one the sacred gems of rigging, along with true fkik, and no-gimbal, so they only share knowledge about this in quite dar corners hehe. I'll start looking into math offset, modifiers and the likes. Any inputs from you guys would be grately appeciated.


eek

Edit: I just found this in the reference



xformMat <transform_matrix3> <space_matrix3>
Returns the transform matrix transformed into a particular space. For example, say you have a rotation you want to apply, but you want to perform the rotation in another coordinate system. To do this, you typically transform into the space of the coordinate system, then apply the transformation, and then transform out of that coordinate system. This method transformats matrix transform_matrix3 into the space of matrix space_matrix3. The resulting matrix3 value is calculated as space_matrix3 * transform_matrix3 * inverse(space_matrix3).

[Wahooney]

This problem would be made a hell of a lot easier if max had a Transform List controller.

[j-man]

Err I posted that in my first post!!

Well it seems I have missed the point, the pivot point eh!

J.

[PEN]

I think that the xForm mod is a good place to start. It is a real pain to get working and even more of a pain to find a good way to manage the keys that are created for the animator to deal with. You need to find some way to have one key handle all the motion on the pivot. Also if you animate the pivot of the object and offset the xForm of the object to compensate how will that look in the track view to an animator? You can a sudden spike in the keys. That spike needs to stay on a linear curve over one frame or a step key would be better. What will stop the animator from changing it by mistake? Really what you need is a seperate track of animation that handles just the position of the pivot so that you don't get the spike in the position track of the control.

[marktsang]

i am working on two versions of animatable pivots atm,
one using an xform modifer (and some other stuff) and another using script and expression controllers, both work but have certain limitations, but no more limitations than i have seen in other setups like biped ect...

as paul said the hardest part of it is managing the keys so they are meaningful to the animator - something i am lookin into now - i have a few ideas that may or may not work...

mark

[eek]

Hey Pen,

Yes this is what im planning, so atm it would either be a new modifier or an extention of the xform.

So you dont control the gizmo postion only its rotation and the center position, overall position is on the main object.

The key for the pivot and gizmo when created must be stepped. This removes a second 'fix' key.

Whenever you make a keys via autokey, a button etc, it need to automatically make it stepped. Also deleting a key of the pivot pos deletes the same for the gizmo pos.


The gizmo rotation, essentially the rotation of the obj need to feel that you only rotate the
itself and dont have a slider etc so maybe a rotation doubling fix.

Also a way to acces the sub object modifier values of the xform when not in thst mode, for intance in create. MAybe onscreen controls the drive sub object values. Does anyone know how to do this?

eek

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