Hi. I am creating an animation that shows a production process workflow.
There is a recurrent situation in these types of animations where one element gets moved through different stages. How do you usually work in these situations?
I am for example trying to use constraints:
The block has a child on the crane and I was expecting to add a second child to the destination point.
I swapped the influence: when the crane leaves the block the influence to the crane gets back to 0 and the destination empty influence is 1. But it returns to the primal position instead of staying in the new empty position.
This is my first attempt. Ideally, I would love to be able to leave the object in the last position of the child. But I can see with 0 influence the object returns to the original position.
Questions:
Would you deal with this workflow using child of constraint?
Is there any way where my object stays in the last position of the parent when I set the influence to 0 (I am almost sure that this is not possible).
Then how to “override” the position to a new empty?
Sure, why not. Sometimes, I like adding a layer of indirection, so I’d child-of an empty instead, and then copy transforms from that empty. But that’s for leaving my options open and between-frames interpolation. Doing it directly on the cube is fine.
You will be happy to hear that this is super possible. The thing you’re looking for is a “visual transform”. You can create a visual transform at the same time that you set your influence to 0 by hitting the little x button to the right of the influence slider. (You can also do it with “apply visual transform” operation, but that can be a little confusing in this situation.)
If for some reason you couldn’t apply visual transform like I mentioned, you could make a copy transforms constraint, which, on world->world, is going to override all earlier constraints (and keyframed transforms.)
Thank you,
Actually, someone explained to me in the office how to do it by using a copy transform instead of the child. Also, one key element of the “trick” is to make everything guided by the mesh I want to move instead of the other way around.
You will be happy to hear that this is super possible. The thing you’re looking for is a “visual transform”. You can create a visual transform at the same time that you set your influence to 0 by hitting the little x button to the right of the influence slider. (You can also do it with “apply visual transform” operation, but that can be a little confusing in this situation.)
The issue with the X is that you lose the constraint. So the idea of having control over the whole scene ends when you press that apply.
It doesn’t destroy the constraint. It sets the influence to 0 while keeping the visual transform-- the last position it was in. You can set the influence back to 1 whenever you want. If you don’t want to set the influence to 0, you can use an “apply visual transform” operation instead.