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Animating a cube to rock back and forth
Hi,
I have a cube that is alive, and I want him to rock back and forth as if he is trying to tip himself over.So I figure I need to have the pivot point on the bottom left of the cube, then rotate over Z access, and back down again. Then I need to move the pivot to the bottom right of the cube, and repeat the rotation in the opposite direction.
When I tried to move the pivot point and set a keyframe for it’s new position I got stuck. I could have the pivot in one place or another, but not animated. Is it possible? Then I tried to use parenting with nulls to get it to work but had no luck.
Any suggestions? PS I am using R10.
Regards,
John -
5 Replies
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Putting the Cube in a Null and animating the Null is likely the way to go. It’s going to be a bit complex though. You will need to rotate the null to get the rotation you want but when you move the cube in the null to get a new rotation point you will have to move the null the same amount in the opposite direction so it doesn’t appear to move. Unless I’m missing something obvious this early in the morning.
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Ah yes that sounds like it might do the job – will have a play tonight.
I’ve just been reading up about R11 (https://www.c4dcafe.com/reviews/r11/) and it seems that the new Pivot Object function that works with the new Motion Clips features might do the trick.
However, for what seems to be something very straight forward it would be good to have a cross platform solution.
Darn it – the reason I was animating a cube is that I had been bogged down trying to learn C4D and just wanted to have a go at some pure animation for fun – so what easier than a squishy stretchy cube! or not…
Thanks for your response
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You can do this with nulls but I would just go for this plug in
https://eggtion.net/roll-it/en/index.html
its exactly what you need and its free.
/Randy -
Thanks! that plugin seems to do the job pretty well. I’m sure I don’t know exactly how to use it yet, but after a quick play, by setting Roll and Floor to on, and selecting geometry radius, it works.
Not quite 100% perfect though as the bottom corners of my cube slide across the floor just slightly on rotation, where as I wanted them fixed. It might just be in-adequate use of the plugin on my part though.
Thanks guys
John -
Just if anyone was wondering, I went with the null set up in the end. Mainly because of the reason mentioned above. Also, it was quite straight forward to to just animate the two positions to go either + or – 200 units in x, and easy to work with the keys once in timeline.
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