Hi all, I want to do a simple animation where I have an axis and want to rotate an object about that axis. The caveat is the object is mirrored and at an angle. So I want the object on both sides on the mirror to rotate around the original axis and the mirrored axis. See the attached pic.
Any ideas on how to do this? Even if I have to apply the mirror modifier?
Thanks in advance!
Add an armature bone, have it line up (edit mode) with the body of your object using the [Shift][S] to snap head and tail to cursor (sounds like you know how) and then have that armature be the “parent” of anything you want to rotate along that axis. Bone roll should ideally line up with the flap as well; set bone roll visually if you have to.
Don’t use mirror modifier… use Copy Rotation Constraint in Local mode…
like this…
[ATTACH]179726[/ATTACH]
norvman - This looks like it will work but I cannot figure out how to align the axis to the object so each object has it’s own axis. Here is what I get…see pic. Any suggestions?
Does the axes look better if you put it in Gimble mode? if it doesn’t change anything, then you should rearrange your object in edit mode. Or a second solution would be to use empty and to align them to the axes you want and then you parent your object to the empties. then you just have to animate the empty.
Hope it helps.
Mathias.
One of the reasons I usually opt for armatures when rigging things like this is because the end-to-end direction of a bone is always the Y axis. This way, if you can find mesh face / vertex at either end (e.g. opposite ends) of the centreline, use [SHIFT][S] to snap the cursor to each one (I mean one at a time), then you can use Edit mode to [Shift][S] snap the bone end (or head) to that point. That takes care of the Y-axis of the bone matching your model and it’s only a matter of getting the bone roll correct to sort the X and Z directions.
Delete the Left Object > Select the Right Object > Shift+D to Duplicated it > ‘M’ (to move it to a new layer) > Set it’s Rotations back to Zero in ‘World’ mode…
(remember you still have the original on another layer with the proper rotations on it that you can copy from later) >
With the copy selected set and ‘apply’ the mirror modifier… (before anything is rotated) > now copy the Rotations from your original Object to the left copy (via the left tool bar transform settings) With the exception… that you will have to make some of these negative rotations …
Looks like probably … ‘Z’ will have to be set to a negative rotation…
