Yes, that’s exactly what I need for wheel rotation. I was even thinking, I could make it pretty flexible with AN by using the Z size of the wheel object to have AN automatically calculate the circumference, making the AN solution more appealing because I could replace the casters, just point to new objects, and they are rigged. Well, other than creating the modifiers I need. I Do have a way to do something only one time in AN, where the whole node setup runs every time. No one has responded in the other thread of it’s a bad setup, but it works. Since you can’t use variables without adding scripts, I just use an object as a boolean variable. So it runs once, checks if an object (that it the nodes created) is a certain size. Then run whatever it is you need to run once. The next time it runs, it checks the size of that again, which has now been scaled so it chooses the other path.
I also am not great at AN yet. I’m not quite sure everything you can do. And geometry nodes definitely has it’s place. I’m kind of waiting for everything nodes to Really get into it because the biggest thing I want to use it for is filling the “volume” of an object with other objects without having to set up collisions that take forever to calculate. I just want to have objects in a collection. Create a volume that I want them to be in, change a few settings for how dense it is, and have them pack it in there as closely as it can without intersecting. Great for odd shaped objects, like imagine you wanted to fill a transparent vase with tiny chairs. That simulation would take Forever since you’d have to use mesh to calculate it. Yeah, I have learned some great tricks to speed it up, but I’d much rather a solution that always works, and I don’t need it animated.
@DNorman - did you try my last file? It works with rotating in Z as well. I just have it locked because I felt it was easier to drag around so I didn’t have to hit G then ShiftZ to move around on the plane.
Also, AN isn’t too bad. That file in particular is pretty simple.
The “NodeTree” is the one that does everything.
I put all 4 targets into a named collection. The subprogram is there to just run through each of those objects one at a time. This way, it works for 3,4,5, however many targets you need. 2 and 4 are common for equipment, and 5 is common for chairs.
And the only thing that’s really happening there is getting the world position of the object, “object matrix input,” and assinging that to the location of the same object.
You can hit ‘w’ with a node selected, and add a viewer node for most nodes. You’ll notice the object matrix input gives you a 4x4 matrix. I have NO idea what the matrix means in terms of how it’s recording the data, but that’s why they also give you the decompose Matrix node, which splits it up into LocRotScale.
So that’s all I’m using AN for. I’m otherwise using 2 Limit Distance constraints. One as inside, and one as outside. The reason I’m doing that is to make the transition a bit smoother. You can also change the Clamp region to be OnSurface, which will give you the exact distance. But then the rotation isn’t random enough, in my opinion. I wanted it to drag behind the wheel a bit, but if it goes back on itself, I wanted it to flip, rather than have a slow rotation. But if you don’t have the “outside” one then it can flip 180deg in only one frame, which is obviously too fast unless you have a really heavy object run into it going fairly fast, in which case, no one will notice the casters.
So I haven’t figured out “memory” in AN yet. I couldn’t find examples of anyone getting data at time. I thought I had a way to do it, but I was wrong. If you find that, let me know, because then I can add automatic wheel rotation to this, and I will share the file of course.
