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Thaller
07-27-2006, 12:50 AM
Hi all,

We are rigging some characters for an animation job and used a combination of parent/child relationships combined with some Inverse Kinematics scripting we came across. We are currently trying to constrain the range in which one of the elements moves and think this can be achieved with an expression that limits the range and moves at a ratio based on some of the other elements in the chain.

For my mind to achieve this we need to extract some of the actual coordinate information from elements in the parent child chain. Unfortunately from what I can tell a child's property data does not update when it responds to it's parents movements. It still shows the initial data it had when the link was made, even thought it may be moving, scaling or rotating in synch with it's parent.

The question:
Does anyone know how to retrieve the actual data of a child, such as it's current position (as affected by it's parent).

I hope I have explained this well enough to understand what the question, thought some background might help.

Look forward to hearing some thoughts -
Cheers.

graymachine
07-27-2006, 05:43 AM
The following script:


u = thisComp.layer("leader").toWorldVec([1,0]);
radiansToDegrees(Math.atan2(u[1],u[0]))


woud return the absolute rotation of the layer called "leader".

This is from motionscript.com where I assume you got the IK script, too. It's heavy stuff.

Also, you mentioned clamping.. there is a vector clamp function in AE. If you are already aware of this, then never mind. But it works like this:

clamp (value, limit1, limit2)

Thaller
07-27-2006, 09:02 AM
Thanks Harry I'll give it a try!

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