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Parenting points and polygons?
Hello, I have this model that I want to assign a parent/child relationship to specific points that I will be animating. Attached is an image of the two objects. What I want to do is extend the diamond of this object with the cylinder (child) object moving up as the diamond extrudes outwards. So I want both these objects to move but the child to follow the contour of the parent model. Thanks!
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6 Replies
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will the cylinder just stay on the one edge or will it go all the way around the diamond?
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It will go all the way around the diamond. I’m using Point level animation to move the diamond So I’d like to make the cylinder the child of specific points on the diamond so they can follow as it extends and retracts.
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the easy way to move the cylinder from one point to the other would be along a spline so I would select the edges of the diamond it is to move along and do an Edge to Spline and then use an Align To Spline tag to attach the cylinder above it along the spline, the trick then is to get the spline to move with the extrusion that would be possible with xpresso or perhaps a dynamics connector or maybe a constraint tag.
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Wow I was actually just thinking about how to animate the cylinder and was thinking a spline would work. Now I know it will thanks. I’m a complete beginner btw, thanks for all your help!
I don’t know much about express but have watched a bunch of tutorials. and some searches. People are points towards xpresso and point nodes. Ive been playing around with it but had no luck. Any chance you could give me some pointers on what inputs to what and/or what parameters I would use for this? there so many parameters that aren’t so obvious to what they are…any info would help.
I’m probably going to remodel the diamond to separately so I wont have this problem but it would still be nice to know how to do what I’m asking for future reference…thanks again!
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here’s a test with two capsules one using Align to Spline (with a second rail spline to keep it aligned properly) and a second one using Spline Wrap. I chamfered (rounded the corners) of the spline a bit so the turns weren’t so abrupt.
xpresso is on both the splines to keep them moving with the extrude (which is PLA but there is more than one way to do that). The xpresso uses point information from the cylinder so I moved the axis of the splines from the center to up near the corner so it aligns properly with one of the points that are moving.
3964_diamondextrudetrial.c4d.zip
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Wow that’s exactly what I need! Thanks, now I can start animating! I was just about to start remodeling while banging my head on the computer. Thanks a bunch!
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