Hi Luc-Eric:
A simple problem I had with the lack of a center/offset rotation pivot
attribute in Maya was when I was rigging this guy:
http://1drv.ms/1lndvDS
His eyelids are using a combination of weighted joints to control major
movement and clusters, to control the side-to-side. For the clusters,
however, I needed their centers to match the rotation of the eyelid
bones exactly
so that I could use set driven keys to connect the control curves to
their movement. I ended up having to make a quick hack script that would
makea temporary orientConstraint, grab the offset values, then delete
the constraint and piping those values into the rotateAxis of the
clusters instead to bring them back into original position.
There is probably a better way to do this and avoid having to work
around like this (I was originally going to do bones all over the
eyelids but it would have been a nightmare setting SDKs for that), but
with the time limit, it was all I had and what I could do. A secondary
transform attribute that was common to all transform nodes would go a
long way towards helping XSI > Maya transitions, I think, especially
when you need like exact pivot matches instead of rotating things around
manually to kind of estimate it. :P Plus then you wouldn't have to worry
about geometry VS clusters VS whatever node it is, as long as it has a
transform, you know you're safe since you have access to a second pivot
instead of having to create an intermediate null object for that purpose
(and in any case that doesn't work as well for relative-deforming clusters)
Hope that makes sense!
Yours sincerely,
Siew Yi Liang
On 4/2/2014 8:25 AM, Luc-Eric Rousseau wrote:
On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 8:30 AM, Ponthieux, Joseph G. (LARC-E1A)[LITES]
<j.ponthi...@nasa.gov> wrote:
Maya: I have to create a set of multiple nulls with custom rotations to
set up the angle of rotation properly for the surface. If I want to rotate
the surface I have to dig through all these nulls to get to the right one,
select and rotate it just to rotate the surface.
Is that always true in your scenarios? Moving center in Softimage is
like moving all the points of the geometry. (What brent calls
"transforming the geometry")
Knowing that it does that, wouldn't the simplest work-around for your
specific scenario in Maya be to select all points and move/rotate
them.
