faster constraints creation

Support Basics & Interface
1

hi

I am helping a senior studio student with animating his shelter container design.
the design has many ribs which will move left and right. In addition there is a
fabric over the ribs which will fold or unfold.

the zick zack fabric can be easily animated with scale along on axis.

however the ribs which are tubings would squeeze together so we do need to move
them closer together or more far away.

the trick we decided to use is to create empties which are parented and a main parent
empty will through scaling move them. with a copy location constraining we try to move
all ribs with the movement of the empties.

this trick works perfect BUT you have to select the rib, create a constraint ad than type in the empty name. with the amount for ribs we have thats a time eater.

with track to (crtl t) or so you can shift select objects and blender creates all relationships and fills in all information for you. do I miss something or does that only work with the track constraint and not the other one?

it would be great in case the other constraints could be accessed the same fast and easy way.

2

Post a .blend, your text is SUPER confusing.

3

arg the blend files are few MB big.

maybe to shorten it, to create a track constraint all you have to do is to select the camera than an empty and hit “crtl t”. very easy and fast.

is the same possible with all other constraints? it would be great in case when you hit crtl t you get a pop-up asking you which constraint you want.

i am not sure if something like this is already in blender. never found it sofar.

4

That’s an interesting idea. I think it would be useful if you could post this question to the funboard mailing list (http://projects.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-funboard) to be discussed further.

5

so i assume that the function doesnt exist yet, but you are right it might be good to propose it.

crtl t, crtl p why cannot that be one menu.

claas

6

It’s there and in the menus.

Object -> Constraints -> Add Constraint (Ctrl Alt C)

Works in Pose Mode as well :slight_smile:

7

hi broken,

autsch, Ihave to admit that I hardly ever used the menus from the 3d window.
I mainly used the space bar menu because I thought that I read once that the
accessible tools are all in there as in the window menus.

thank you for pointing out this way. I plainly did not realize that.

is it maybe in the planing to make both menus the same, object from 3d window
and object from the space menu?

claas

8

Yeah, i’s a bit of a nasty situation. Actually, the code for the header menus and the toolbox is completely separate, meaning it all needs to be done twice, so naturally things get left out. Unifying this is one of the goals of the planned ‘unified tools API’ project, when that ever happens…

9

I love the time statement …

well at least I am aware of the differences now.

10

I think I know what you are talking about, I did somthing similiar with a hydrolic tail.

How many ribs are you talking here?

Each end of the hydrolics on there had to have about 3 steps each, plus naming. But it got the job done and they all move in and out accordingly.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v312/Haker/pose.png