[Rick Morton]

Thanks for all your patience, Jim. I appreciate the help.
Let me try to explain the action more clearly.
In a room there are some statues lying around on the floor.
Fork lift Robot rolls in. Goes up to a statue and slides the claws under one. Claws move up and statue moves up.
Robot turns to the left. Heads off in that direction. Maybe turns a little as he goes.

So… when the robot comes in, he can’t be connected to the statue. Right?
He picks it up. I match the position keyframes with the claws and the statue so it moves up in sync.
NOW I need the Robot and the statue to be linked for the turn. This is where I’m having a problem. I tried putting them in a null and that works, but the axis of the null is off. When I try to change the axis to the center, all hell breaks loose.

Is that understandable?

[Rick Morton]

Hello, again.

Ok… this Center Axis thing is driving me crazy. I just can’t seem to make it work. I have a robot and an object he’s carrying. He picks it up and moves forward with it. Fine. Now I want him to turn right/or left and then continue. So I created a null to put both the robot and the object is so they can turn together. The axis for the null is nowhere near the other two objects. I put them in the null. Then unlock the axis and move it over the center of the robot so the turn is right. Now, when I re-lock the axis button, everything moves back to where it was. ???
The CENTER AXIS menu choice NEVER works for me. What am I missing here? I feel like an idiot that I can’t make this work or understand what I’m doing wrong.

[Rick Morton]

Thanks!

[Rick Morton]

I’ve just discovered the animation timeline window. Great help. However… is there a way to compress the timeline? I can’t figure that out. I have to take the current time marker and continue dragging to the right to get to the end of the timeline. There MUST be a way to compress this. ??

[Rick Morton]

Thanks. I’ll give it a look. Always so frustrating!

And I think I figured out how to animate separate objects when they’re moving together. Put the separate objects in a null and keyframe the individual movements for each, and keyframe the null to move the group. ???

[Rick Morton]

Yup. I finally did that. I tried that first but must have done something wrong because I couldn’t get any thickness. I tried it again and it worked fine. Thanks for the response.

[Rick Morton]

Ok… I know this is really dumb. But I’m trying to figure out the easy, correct way to make a simple, iron-like angle piece. I’ve included a snap of the shape. I can’t figure out how to do it. I’ve tried making a spline of the shape, which is what I did here, and extruded it, but there’s no thickness. I tried a cube with polygons and tried to extrude the top ones but that didn’t work. I know this is really easy to do. I’m just stumped. The perspective example is just 4 cubes stuck together. Not right, I know.

[Rick Morton]

Thanks.
I’m going to try to get back to this today. Have REAL work to do first. ☺ Thanks for your help.

[Rick Morton]

Hmmmm. Not working for me. When I turn on the Rigid tag, I can no longer move the plank to take it out of the stack. ??? I know I’m doing something wrong – I keep looking at your example – but can’t figure it out.

[Rick Morton]

Thanks. Sounds complicated, but I’m going to look at your example and give it a try!