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manipulating values for several objects
Hello.
I am very new to Cinema4D. I am using version 11 for mac, and would like to know how can I do the following:
I have sevaral similar objects, each inside its own group of objects. I would like to manipulate all of these similar objects simultaneously, say, rotate them all together in unision, but without rotating the other items inside each group.
For example, if I have:
ARM>FOREARM>HAND as a group on a model.
and I have another 3 models just like that one, and I want all of them to rotate their HAND objects in unision, but not the FOREARMs. Is there a way to “tag” items to follow a mother item inside another group? I know this is elementary… Thanks for any patience!
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3 Replies
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The easiest way to do it is to use set driven keys. So, in the object manager, right-click on the object that you want to drive the other objects and select Animation>Set Driver from the context menu. Then repeat for the other objects, selecting instead Animation>Set Driven. If you choose absolute they will all have the same value as the driver object. If you choose relative, whatever changes you make will be added to or subtracted from the existing values.
If you just want to do it on a one-off basis you can multiselect the object and enter the value in the object tab. Or if you want to do it in a relative fashion, click in the field (example: rotation-heading) and type x+(amount of change you want). You can use other operators too, like -,*,/, etc.
To facilitate selection you can use a selection object (Objects>Scene>Selection).
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Thanks for the tip. I am struggling a bit with this way of doing it, probably because the axis of all the (dozens) of objects are not exactly where they should be… Another question:
I just found the Look At Camera expression, and this is exactly what I want: I have several text objects distributed in a 3D space, a sort of 3D grid, and as the camera flies around, mving and rotating, I want the text objects to alwyays face the camera. The Look at CAmera seems to be the tool fallen from heaven for me!
BUT, as soon as I apply the expression to one object, as a test, it imediately reverses and faces its BACK to the camera…! What am I doing wrong? The axis of the object is 0,0,0Thanks!
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Yeah, that is unfortunate. If you aren’t animating the text via MoGraph you can make it editable and then simply rotate the axis 180 degrees using the axis tool.
Otherwise, you can use the much more flexible Constraint Tag which is in the character tags menu. Drop it on the text object and check the Aim box. In the Aim tab, click Add and drag the camera into the target box. Then set Z- as the aim axis. Go to the tag’s Basic tab and check the “Camera Dependent” box so can see the changes in the editor window.
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