[Dustin Bailey]

Yes it does. And thank you for taking the time to explain the complexity of what I was asking to do. I hope in the future a simpler solution can be found, but for now I’ll happily handle these nulls. Thank you so much for your time.

Cheers,
Dustin

[Dustin Bailey]

Hi Xavier,

Sorry if I lost you on the last post. Your description is accurate, but I’ll still need to be able to offset C2 and C1 from P. Like if you have one object parented to another, you can still move the child around indepentedly, but it also remains tied to it’s parents position and rotation. At the moment I don’t foresee the need to scale the relationship.

Maybe a little background could help. I’ve been doing a lot of character animation recently using puppet pins tied to a rig of nulls. These nulls are all parented together, e.g. hand to elbow to arm to torso. If I move/rotate the arm, the elbow and hand follow. And I can still keyframe and offset the hand and elbow nulls if needed.

My projects have gotten very messy with the amount of nulls being key framed. If I want to copy a pose I’ve used before, I have to go to each null separately and copy and paste keyframes. Thinking I could later mimic a parent/child relationship between point controllers, I built a pseudo effect with a position/angle controller for each null I’d normally use. I then tied my puppet pins to these. This keeps all my points on one effect and all my keyframes on one layer. This allows me to copy and paste poses all at once.

Does any of this make sense? I fear I’m confusing the the issue more rather than clarifying it. I’ve attached a screenshot to my current rig if it helps.

[Dustin Bailey]

Thanks Xavier for such a quick response. I’ve seen your posts all over the forum and am geeking out a bit that you responded.

I had some time to try out the expression and it’s kinda close, but it’s not the exact parent/child relationship I was looking for. Here’s the hiccups I’m noticing.

• Rotation is off from angle control. Fixed by adding degreesToRadians();
• Child doesn’t follow the parents position.
• Child does rotates around the parent point. Even if I move the parent. However, if I offset the rotation of the parent and then try to drag the child point around, the child point floats away from the cursor.

Ideally I’d be able to daisy chain a few of these together to help with a rig I’m building. I feel like I’m reinventing the wheel, but I know the rig will be so cool if this is possible. I’m going to continue to tinker, but I’d love to hear your thoughts. Thanks again!

P=effect("Character Rig")("Point 1");
C=effect("Character Rig")("Point 2");

R=effect("Character Rig")("Point 1 Rotation")
a=degreesToRadians(R);

u=sub(C, P);
c=Math.cos(a);
s=Math.sin(a);

x = c*u[0]-s*u[1];
y = s*u[0]+c*u[1];

[P[0]+x, P[1]+y]; // result (rotated C)