Hard Light Productions Forums
Modding, Mission Design, and Coding => The Modding Workshop => Topic started by: Darkhill on January 13, 2006, 01:03:15 am
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I know how to make objects rotate but I can't seem to make it rotate from the end of the subobject, the center of rotation seems to be somewhere in the middle of the model. I know with turrents you can just center the axes and it will spin in the z axis fine. But I'm trying to get an object to move around on the y axis.
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You can move the axis in Truespace, there's a button to manipulate axes where the center axis button is IIRC (It's called Axes). After clicking that just move the axis to the end of the subobject with the move tool. You can set the axis of rotation in PCS or Modelview. It's Subobject tab in PCS, and Movement axis (below Movement type)
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What does it look like? The only axes button that seems to do anything for me is the center one.
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If you press and hold the left mouse button a few other buttons will appear above. This works with many other buttons in TS, all of those have a red triangle in the upper right corner
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I get my buttons by pressing the icon finder button. The only axes related buttons I see are Normalize Scale, Normalize Rotation, Normalize Location, Move axes to center, and Axes. The move to center seems to be the only one to do anything. I can see the little axes object on my submodel. And its right in the middle of it where it got moved to but I can't see to grab it and do anything with it.
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Axes is the thing you need. Select an object, click Axes and you will be able to manipulate the pivot point of the object. You do this using the standard move/rotate/scale tools.
When you click the button, the pivot point (simbolized by an axis tripod) will become white in the viewport (in wireframe mode) IIRC.
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I got the axes thing figure out, and now the object just spins on the center instead of a circle. Somehow I had got it to rotate from one end like I wanted it too. But seen something I had to fix and now I can't get it working again. Doesn't seem to matter where I position the axes icon it still rotates from the center. Is there some placement with the lights and how the bounding box for the object?
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is it attached to something else ? Objects have axis data, and so do object groups.
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I think a light gets used as the axis when you attach one to a piece of geometry. They also seem to pull the bounding box in Truespace out to the location of the light, but I'm not sure if that translates through PCS or not. The safe way to do it is to place each light at the point you want the axis to sit before you glue everything up, though there's nothing about it that can't be fixed after the fact.
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Thats the weird thing, is on the model that I got to work I don't think the axes are right. I know on one side its in the middle of the model and for both the lights are up above in space. I don't ever glue parts to anything, I always use the Trueview plugin to add lights and make subobjects. Basically I need to make a rotating turret and that is one thing I've never been able to do (problem moving axes to one end).
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I just figured it out, you need to set the axes for rotation before you attach the object to the rest of the model. Using Trueview I removed it from the model and added it to the scene. Then I move the axes to the one end added the light and reattached to the model and it worked. Postion of the light doesn't seem to matter. And also it seems once the object has been attached you change the axes location unless you remove it from the model first.
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When using trueview, if you click on the group, and then click on Axes, it will modify the pivot point of the group. For a rotating turret, you need to set that, and the pivot point of the barrels (also the group). You don't really need lights for the groups, I usually only add lights when there is nothing else in the group and therefore I can't make a group without a light. PCS works without lights, but Modelview doesn't, it seems to use the lights exclusively for determining the pivot point.
Now that you mention it, I remember an annoying error in TS, something like you described. I opened TS and a primitive turret, and I could manipulate every pivot point, so it can't be that, but I don't know how it will (won't) work when converted.
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I am probably taking the long way around for changing the axes point. But I just added a couple of rotating objects to another model on my first try with my method. I'm just happy I finally figure out a way to get this to work. Thanks for the help.