Attachment and proximity constraints.

Hi, I’m migrating from a Max/Maya Pipeline and so far all seems to translate pretty well, there are a couple of things I don’t know how to d o in blender and any help would be greatly appreciated.

  1. In Max there is something called “Attachment constraint”, this attaches an object to a deforming face, this is simply using the face’s barycentric coordinates to position a transform and the face’s normal to orient it after the deformation stack has been evaluated.
    In maya there is something similar (I think it’s point on poly constraint for position and normal constraint for orientation.)
    anyone knows what the equivalent in blender would be?

2)in maya there’s the closest point constraint, this constraints a null to the closest point to a surface, and slides the the point on the surface if I move the original transform.
I made a similar constraint in max using raycasting.
Anyone knows a way to accomplish this?

Thanks so much in advance, I’ve heard so many good things about this community that it’s exciting to start being part of it.

Ok, so I found an answer to one of the two at least.
For the closest point constraint the equivalent wold be the shrinkwrap constraint, to make it behave like the maya one just parent the constraint one to an empty and move the empty.
I’m still looking for the attachment constraint equivalent, the shrinkwrap is almost there but the object wont stick to a deforming surface.

Hope this helps someone.

There is no normal constraint as far as I can see, am I wrong?

There is not. It is one big pitfall, unfortunately. You can always parent objects to vertices of a mesh, though.

Hadrien

I’ll code one :slight_smile:

Thanks!

Is this not similar to
-https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?412706-Surface-Follow-from-2016-Blender-Conference
-https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Lucarood/SurfaceDeform
and i guess you could use animation node to loop through some polygon normals and maybe interpolate between location and direction if a animation on the deformed surface is necessary.

By the way would be cool if you share your script.


Hey Vander thanks for the share! that is really cool, unfotunately it’s not the same as a point normal constraint, the biggest difference in effect would be the sliding over a surface effect that plays hand in hand with the shrikwrap constraint, I’ll attach an example of something I did in maya automating a process that includes these constraints, notice how the lid never leaves the surface of the eye even thou the eye is not spherical.

by the way, as soon as I have a functioning constraint you bet I’ll share it!

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Have you solved this problem in blender now? Can you share the method by the way? thank you :pleading_face: