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Author Topic: Rotation control loss for dominos  (Read 2707 times)

FlynnAD

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Rotation control loss for dominos
« on: March 12, 2018, 10:35:13 PM »
Hi all,
I'm trying to make something like a collapsed field of dominos, but more curved in a top view rather than a pure straight grid.

I'm trying to control the rotation transforms, specifically only X and Z. The issue is that the individual objects seem to be rotating on their local axes, or in an order (like ZYX) that is not resulting in the desired result.

One problem is that the bottom edge of the default plane detaches from the base surface. One of the bottom corners drops lower than the surface plane, which is not desirable. I want the bottom edge of all the planes always touching the surface plane after they are rotated. The other is that the rotation order or local axis leaves the middle objects facing foward, but tilted as if they were doing a cartwheel.

As you can see in the attached screenshots, there are four methods that can be used to achieve the result, but FP uses none of them. I expected FP to use world XYZ rotation, which would result in what I want, but doesn't.

Is this possible? A max file is attached to play with.

Thanks,
Matt

Michal Karmazín

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Re: Rotation control loss for dominos
« Reply #1 on: March 16, 2018, 05:31:22 PM »
Hi Matt,

The Forest Pack plug-in is using local coordinates and applying both rotations results in the unwanted result, where these “sums”. A possible workaround would be to drive the Z Rotation by the Transform > Rotation > Z > Map together with the Animation > Frame from Map feature (animate the item’s rotation on the X axis by a XForm > Gizmo). Attaching the modified scene. Hope you’ll find useful.

Best regards,

FlynnAD

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Re: Rotation control loss for dominos
« Reply #2 on: March 21, 2018, 01:01:56 AM »
Thanks for a solution Michael. Not what I would have expected to do, but the animation on an Xform modifier works.

So next, I was trying this to see if I could find a way of secondary scaling in the Z-direction after applying the rotation & animation. However, the animation is applied first, then any XYZ rotation or scaling, so scaling Z after the object is animated down gives a distorted parallelogram shape and not a rectangular box. I also found out that the animated geometry/ frame map solution does not work if the forest geometry is a single plane and not a thick object (I was trying a single plane in the FP, to then load a Shell modifier up the stack for thickness afterwards). A file is attached showing the erroneous scaling/ stretching that occurs. Being able to have user control over the order in which transforms are applied would solve most or all of this. A user could specify scaling in the Z direction first, then rotation on Z, then rotation on X, for example.

Then I tried manipulating the animation frame map to get other results than that spiral gradient. This uncovered a bug: if a perlin map is inserted into the animation map slot, and the perlin marble has pure white or pure black (or a very near color), the perlin marble crashes FP and 3dsmax. I've attached a demo file. In the material editor, there is a default perlin marble that you can plug in. If you swap this with one of the other perlin marbles, you'll crash 3dsmax.

Matt