#Inserted Animation Track
5 messages in this thread
Thank you for the help with Reflection Mapping. I'm waiting for an animtion to
complete (sometime tomarrow) then I may have a better idea of the problem. It
looks like some of the faces on some of the instances are reflectiong and
others are not. Is it necessary for the instance to have the same orientation
as its parent? Did you rotate the cubic instances you used?
Anyway, I am also having some difficulty with the Objects/tracks/insert file
command in the Keyframer. The inserted animation track is not at the same
scale as the mesh receiving it. When I change the scale of the mesh receiving
the animaiton track, it makes no difference. The inserted track (path) is
equally out of proportion with the mesh receiving the animation track, as if I
hadn't re-scaled the mesh in the first place.
What step am I missing here to make the scale of the inserted animaiton track
and the mesh receiving it the same?
Thanks, Peter Landeck
re: instance orientation – that was part of the tests I did – the instanced
object can be rotated without any problems appearing in the auto reflection
map.
re: track insert – I'll have to play with it here to see what is going wrong.
Quick question – are your units the same for both models?
LAM
Re: Track insert. I think I'm using the same units. I haven't changed
anything in the 3DS.SET file. However, I'm trying to insert the animation from
something prepared by Autodesk and put on the tutorial. (Stairs.3ds). How do
I check for units?
Peter Landeck
Mr. Minton, I got this in response to the Insert Animation Track question. I
haven't tried it yet.
<The inserted animation track is not at the same scale as the mesh receiving
it. When I change the scale of the mesh receiving the animaiton track, it
makes no difference. The inserted track (path) is equally out of proportion
with the mesh receiving the animation track, as if I hadn't re-scaled the mesh
in the first place.>>
When you scale it doesn't change the scale of the path on which it will move.
The path defines distances along which the object will move. The scale defines
the size of the object as it moves along the path. They are independent of each
other. Unfortunately you can't scale a path directly in the Keyframer.
The way to have the path itself scaled when you use File Insert is to do the
following. For example I want to reduce the path length by 2, i.e. 50% it's
original size:
1) Save the mesh and it's path to a file ORIGIN.3DS.
2) Set Drawing Units to Unit = 2. This effectively halves the size of all units
used in the file.
3) Load ORIGIN.3DS. You'll see using Track Info that the path is now half it's
original size.
4) Set the Drawing Units back to Unit = 1. Save the file as SCALED.3DS.
The file SCALES.3DS now contains your object and it's path scaled by 50%. You
can now load ORIGIN.3DS or any other file and merge the object and it's path
will be at the smaller scale that you wanted.
To calculate the Drawing Units setting just do this. If you want to create a
path twice as long, i.e. x2 then use the inverse of this number in the Drawing
Units, i.e. 1/2.
eg. x300% = 1/3 = 0.33, x50% = 1/0.5 = 2, etc.
DaviD "sleep three inches above my bed" GouID
I played some witht track file insert. And I'm not quite sure what your
question is <g>. The path being imported from a file/object should always be
the same regardless of the scale of the object you are applying it to.
As an example, say you have obj1, and are inserting the path from obj2. Obj2 is
a cube 10x10x10. Its path moves it from 0,0,0 at frame 0 to 0,0,100 at frame
30. If you do an insert track on Obj1 (options Object, Relative), starting at
frame 0 and Obj1 originally at 20,20,20, at frame 30 Obj1 should be at
20,20,120. This is regardless of what the size of Obj1 is. It also doesn't
seem to make any difference what the units are on the two files.
So my two questions are: Is the above accurate when you try it? If so, what
are you trying to do <g>? If you want the inserted path to be scaled by the
relative sizes of Obj1 and Obj2, I don't know of a way to do that
automagically. There is a keyscript called pathscal.k3d that will scale a path
based on user inputs, if that is any help.
LAM