• Maxon Cinema 4D

  Animating rotation of hierarchy around multiple object-specific axis.

  Posted by Theodor Kozko on May 7, 2017 at 6:47 pm

  Hello forum!
  Im kind of new to c4d and this is my first post here, but I have gotten a lot of help off of this forum in the past, so I would like to start off by thanking everyone here, who make this place so great – thank you!

  I’ve been trying to tackle this problem for a few days now, and I am completely stuck.
  I have a complex hierarchy in my scene which consists of multiple sweeps, spheres and other objects, with tags, scripts and the works, placed on the surface of a cube. It is a data-visualisation sort of deal. The position of all the objects on the cube are fixed relative to the cube.

  I need to be able to control the animation of the rotation of this cube, with everything on it, around multiple “diagonals” of the cube. I have uploaded an image to demonstrate what I am trying to achieve more clearly. I need to be able to rotate the cube around one of the red, green or blue cylinders. The cube and the objects on it are vastly simplified and are just there for demonstrative purposes.
  

  I was hoping to be able to build some sort of a rig that would allow me to control the rotation animations, maybe something with UserData and xPresso. But to do that, I first need to figure out the logic in constructing the scene, more specifically the elements of rotation.

  I have tried many approaches – constraint tags in PSR and Parent mode, xPresso for transferring rotation from proxy objects to the parent in the cubes hierarchy, creating a hierarchy of nulls for control of the rotation, but nothing would work well, or work at all.

  The main problem that I have been running into is hierarchal order. If I build the hierarchy from the red cylinders as parents to the blue and green, and then rotate a green cylinder, the red, blue and everything higher in the hierarchy stays in place and loses their usefulness. If I start moving these objects to mimic the child green – everything goes out of whack (pretty sure thats the hierarchy of cinema at work).

  Basically what I now know for certain is that I am trying wrong approaches, or doing them incorrectly.
  I would appreciate it a lot if someone here could tell me what would be best practice for controlling the rotation of one object around multiple axis?

  More important info – the center of rotation is the center of the cube. The center of each axis is also at the center of the cube. I need to animate the rotation around only 1 axis at any specific time.

  ex. rotate by 90 degrees around one of the red, then by 35.274 degrees around one of the green, then by xxx around another green, then yyy around a blue and then zzz around another red one.

  I am attaching a scene file in which I have positioned cylinders as indicators of the axis locations, and tried to make it as user friendly and understandable as I could.
  11336_c4dforumscenefile1rotationaxis.c4d.zip
  In this scene file, all the cylinders axis are oriented in a way, that it would be enough for me to move the cube and the hierarchy around the P.Rotation values of each cylinder for any rotation, but again, I cant seem to figure out how to retain control of the rotation after a rotation iteration.

  Sorry for any grammatical or stylistic errors and I hope this was understandable, english is not my primary language ☺

  Theodor Kozko replied 9 years ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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