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How to connect all points of one object to a child object with xpresso?
Greetings, hive mind!
What I’m trying to do is have two objects that are exactly the same, including their animated points. I’d like to be able to animate the points of the parent version of the object and have the child do exactly the same thing while having the ability to adjust that animation later. I’m thinking xpresso is probably the way to go, but I’m a super noob at xpresso and cant figure out how to connect all the points of one object to another. I can figure out how to get one point to connect, but these objects have lots of points and it isn’t practical to hand connect them and keep track of all the point indexes.
Is there a way to do this with xpresso or possibly a script? Or maybe there is something even simpler that I’m not thinking of?
Thanks!
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7 Replies
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the simplest way is make an Instance of the original
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The simplest method I can think of is to use a cloner object, or an instance (Create > Modeling > Instance). Any point animation you apply to the main object will then be matched by the clone or instance. If you want to be able to adjust the animation of the clone/instance separately later, that wouldn’t be possible, but adjusting the animation of the main object will always be matched by the clone/instance.
I’m a neophyte with xpresso too. So I wouldn’t be able to help you there.
Edit: Whoops. I didn’t see Brian’s response while I was writing mine.
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Thanks for the response!
Unfortunately an instance isn’t helping me here. While it DOES create an exact copy, it doesn’t seem that can then use that copy how I want to. I would like the child to be used as the reference object for an atom array. The file structure I’d like would look like this:
Is there a way to do something like this? If the child is an instance, it doesn’t seem to work as an atom array 🙁
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How about this? You can animate the points of the pyramid and the instance will follow as the form for the Atom Array.
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HaHA!
Thanks so much! Apparently if you have the the Atom Array:Instance parented to the parent, it breaks the atom array. Just have to keep them separate.
Problem solved 🙂
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Great.
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For extra credit: if you are animating the points (vertexes) of the objects and using PLA (and you dont’ have the latest version of C4D where you can have easing on Point Level Animation) you can use nulls linked to each point in expresso and animate the nulls, which you can have easing on. The points will puppy dog along behind. It also allows you to manually animate things without switching to point mode.
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