I’ve hunted around a bit, but haven’t been able to figure out the following
1st, … relative positiong?
working with actions, and the NLA editor… I have some actions going on with the same objects that move in space at different times to specific locations (relative to its parent, so the parent may move, but these distances are always the same)… so, if I have some points A (start),B,C, D…
maybe I’m not using actions right, but when I try to define actions moving to point B, C, D … if it currently is at point C and should go to point D, it snaps back to the initial posiition (point A). What I would like is for the object to be able to go to any point without having to go pack to the start point (A).
thinking about it, maybe actions aren’t the right way to do it?
2nd, … constraints
I have also been looking around, but haven’t found any way to track an objects position in reverse… so if object A moves -10.0 then object B would move +10.0. The closest I found was a pulley/rope system script but it just seems ultra complicated for the simple thing I am trying to do?
Your first question I don’t totally understand what you are trying to do. I think maybe you are trying to use actions when you should just use simple keyframing. But maybe I don’t understand the problem.
For you second question: I don’t think you can do this with constraints right now. However, you can fake this functionality with IPO drivers. So go read up on those, and see if they won’t solve your problem.
-edit-
Here’s a little demo to show you what I mean. It is only setup to work on the
X axis, but you can do it on all of them. Grab the top cube and move it around and look at the effect on the bottom cube.
1… sorry I guess the question wasn’t so salient… I can try again…
Basically, I was thinking if you can define positions of objects / poses by local, global, normal coordinates, then why can’t you define the animations by those terms?!
I have actually done it with key frames, but when I want to rearrange it is a bit of a chore, and I am simply trying to figure out if there is a way to get around it, for example for one object I started with a pattern: a-b-c-d-e
now it is something like : a-d-a-c-b-a-e-b-a
and in the future… unknown!?
Each of those points actually represents a configuration of ~10 objects; there are like 20 configurations and it is unclear at this point what order the configurations should be in and which ones for the final animation, so I was hoping to setup actions that would trigger a reconfiguration into any one of the 20 for easy reordering, but if the objects keep snapping back to zero it doesn’t really help, so it will mean reworking and more pre planning shrug
2nd … constraints… absolutly perfect. and… wow, so simple. Thanks for your help, I was hoping for a nudge toward the solution, like pointing me towards the IPO curves, but the demo was beyond what I expected, and was really helpful! … thanks!!
Goto the NLA Editor and add the Action as a Strip with Shft-A with your mouse cursor over the Action in the left column. Now hit N to get to the Transform Tab and you can set the Start and End frames and you can set it to Hold to prevent it snapping back to the start frame.