Replace Mesh MUSH
A true story:
Three-hundred and fifty cars zooming down a freeway, congestion, brake lights
flash, cars slow to a crawl — the animation almost to perfection…a feat of
single-minded determination!
With only 24 hours remaining till the deadline, the animator, with special
satisfaction, takes a break… One last little detail and the project goes out
on the net, and the animator can sleep a full night for the first time in
months… All that remains to be done is to use Replace Mesh to update all
those ugly box-mobiles to become Tercels in twelve contemporary colors. The
command is executed, but the result is an explosion of parts in a heap at each
end of the freeway!
Now it is 5:00 am, and I am trying to figure out what went wrong:
1) I started with twelve identical "box" cars in twelve different colors.
2) I detached one of the rear faces from each car as a "brake light".
3) I linked each light to a car in Keyframer.
4) I also created a set of high-resolution cars with the same names and links.
5) The bounding boxes and pivot points for both sets of meshes were identical
— except for the tail lights.
5) … then I animated hundreds of instances…
6) When I did my Replace Mesh, I ended up with tail lights strewn all over the
freeway…
7) The after the Replace, the brake lights were correctly placed in 3D Editor,
but in the Keyframer at frame 0, they had gotten completely mixed up on the
master objects. Some were stacked neatly in a pile, one placed correctly, and
one properly named light did not get replaced. The instances were a total
mess, with brake lights strewn hither and tither…
8) I tried patiently moving the lights back onto their parents, deleting the
instances (one at a time…), saving and re-Replacing the mesh, but the exact
same thing happened!
Questions:
A) Why would the keyframer show geometry differently in frame 0 than in the 3D
Editor. (Yes, there were linked parts, but none of their parents moved–only
the instances were animated.)
B) Why would (most of) the child (master) parts end up in a neat pile?
C) Why me?
—Donald Newlands