Maya Animation :: Create Curve Based On Path Of Object?
Mar 10, 2011
I am doing some animations involving sine waves, and I can make an expression that controls the translation of an object such that it travels along the path of a sine wave, but I can't figure out how to dynamically create an editable sine wave curve.
Is there a way to have Maya generate a curve based upon the path that an object travels upon?
For instance I have a sphere that is moving along the X axis with time, and also moving up and down on the Z axis back and forth. I would like to make an editable curve object of this path of motion.
I can see in Maya 2012 we will have motion trails where we can see the actual path an object is moving along, and that we will be able to interact with this path to alter the animation, but what if we could take that path and make it an actual curve or NURBS object?
i am trying to add CV curves to a scene that I already created.
whenever I draw the curve in side view, it is actually nowhere near the object that I wanted it to be near. Its like super far away and im not sure how to move it to the right spot.
Is there some method to add the curve based on a position of an object?
I've got a Locator attached to a Curve with a Motion Path - the Motion Path is animated so the Locator moves nicely along the Curve. I now want to swap the original Curve with a new one and have the Locator follow it instead.
Is there a way to simply switch curves and tell the Motion Path to use a new Curve while keeping the animated keys in the Motion Path node?
I've tried playing around with the connection editor but cant manage to connect the new Curve to the Motion Path nodes "geometryPath"
When I assign an object to a path using the default setting the object sits nicely on the first point of the cv curve in the path. And moves fine going in one direction but as it goes around a corner it is offset from the curve but continues along with this new offset until the end.
I am trying to attach an object to a motion path but when i do the object goes to the beginning of the path but when i move the time slider nothing happens and when i move the object it isn't attached to the path.
To create an animation similar to the one shown in the page 225, in the tutorial, I created a curve but I am not too sure that was the correct way to create it.
1. Selected the Surfaces Menu.
2. In the font view, using the CV Curve Tool, created the first half.
3. Using Duplicate in the Edit Menu, I created the other half.
4. In the Edit Curves Menu, selected Attach Curves and connected two curves.
5. I, then selected the Animation Menu and created an object to be used as an aircraft and followed the same steps shown in the tutorial and it worked nicely.
i have been using the drivenTime node to create walkcycles that follow motion path curves where the out time is connected to some attribute via a unitToTimeCOnversion node.in previous version of Maya.
When i try to connect anything to the Out Time of new drivenTime node the connection never works, not even keyframes?
I'm trying to animate a moving rope based on simulation data. I know how to import my motion data for individual objects.I've seen lots of tutorials where one uses simulations or soft bodies with IK in order to create a rope. how to use all these features and I want the rope to follow my coordinates exactly. I was hoping I could do something like the following:
1. create points in Maya which correspond to my data points 2. connect the points with a curve 3. loft a circle using the curve as a path in order to make a rope 4. move the points. due to History, the rope position is updated
Is there a way to do something like this in Maya? I've tried, and it looks like ep points do not have key-able channel data, so I can't create animations for them separately. I'm using .mov data file imports to generate x, y, and z motion keys for the points.
How can I make a curve's end points constrain to objects in order to create a "theta" angle line that changes dynamically when the angle between the two objects changes?
I thought they answer may have lay in creating the curve using Maya's new Bezier Curve tool, then using the Rivet plug-in from CreativeCrash to pin it to the middle of two poly cylinders (the "x" and "y" axis.) Unfortunately this doesn't work; the Script editor spits back "is not a vertex!". Either I'm not using Rivet correctly or the end points of a Bezier Curve in Maya are not the same as a CV Curve. But perhaps I'm going about this the wrong way entirely.. I ultimately would wish to extrude geometry about this curve to create a dynamically changing curved cylinder to visualize the angle. It seems like it should be a relatively simple thing to do...
I'm trying to animate a simple character's neck growing along a bendy curve. The head and shoulders need to be fixed at either end of the curve. It would be great if I could avoid ugly texture stretching too.
My Animation Graph Editor is only showing one animation curve (for one attribute) at a time after I have set multiple keyframes for the character set and various attributes. I select multiple attributes, and hit View-Frame All, and it only shows the top attribute of the selected attributes as one curve.
I'm trying to determine how to change the color of an object based upon a custom attribute slider. It would only need to change between 2 colors. I know this can be done by simply autokeying but using a slider would be more useful for my situation.
Is there a way to do this? I've been playing with wiring a simple cube's material but am not sure how to do this.
I'm currently working on a advertisement for a client and I need to creat a kind of ribbon to wrap around like a present. I thought what would be best would be making the ribbon and then using a motion path add it on but also I would add a gravity field to the ribbon so to moved more like a ribbon.
Also with the motion path I have made them and connected my ribbon and for some reason it doesn't move until the last frame and just snaps to that position?
I'm new to Maya 2011 and simply put, I need to know the basics of animating a camera around a scene, along a path, slowing down and speeding up, how to move the point of interest, that type of thing.
a few things involving cameras. My assignment was to use our plane that we modeled with poly's and animate it on a motion path(used cv curve tool) and have a camera above it follow it. Now I got that down perfect.
But what I don't have a clue on, is how do I attach a camera on the same motion path as the plane and have a camera angle right behind the spinning propeller? Like a cockpit view.
I'm rigging a model of a robot and I have wires (nurbs circles extruded along a curve) attaching to two objects that are on different joints. I have it rigged so that when the first joint moves, half of the CVs of all the wires (in a control cluster) move along with the joint (and, in turn, the object they are attached to). This much works fine, the extruded nurb follows the curve and stays the same diameter from start to finish. My problem starts with the rigging of the second joint (the second joint is the parent of the first joint). I've tried many different ways of rigging it, but as I'm only just starting rigging my thought process isn't quite a straight line yet. Basically my problem is when the source curves physically move, the extruded surface goes twice the distance as displayed in the picture below.
I need to know how to get the extruded surface to always be in the same place as the curve with out breaking the connection.
I have a mocap cycle cleaned up and read to cycle, with and without translation, the cycle with translation is perfect because it avoids the sliding feet probelm.
Is there a way to give this cycle a path to follow so it can walk along this path and take curves and those things?
I'm looking around the net, but I don't seem to be able to find anything, the only thing i was able to think of is the path contraint, but, if i'm right, it won't respect the cycle translation, and i can use it without translation but it will be hard to avoid the sliding feet problem.
Can I somehow smooth create editable motion trail curve? And why it is often that undo not working correctly, it is not updating in viewport and also if I left click and check show in and out tangent's they are not showing.
Any way to evenly distribute Locators on a motion path along a nurbs circle? Its for a mouth/lips rig. and I need it to be symmetrical with out manually inputting values.
say objectA and objectB are both Parent constraining objectC. how would I remove the constraint of say, objectB? because in the outliner it only shows up as 1 constraint that has 2 W values.
Is it possible to make an object, say a NurbsSphere to always be on top of the geometry in the viewport, like x-ray on joints. That way, I could use a small sphere in say the Elbow as a controller, and it could be inside the mesh but not hidden. Much like what you see here:
i created a sphere that will control the rotation of the fingers. i align the sphere to the bone so it has the same angles. the bone angle is 0,0,0 but the sphere is (15, 10.23, 2)if i freeze the sphere, the angle get 0,0,0 but they get align with the world axis as X Y Z, how can i 0,0,0 and maintain the align rotation of the bone?
in Softimage there is something call set neutral pose, only change the angle displays to zero so the animator dont have a hard time.
I have setup everything for my charecter painted weights, so im now ready to animate but now i watched that my charecters eyes are not attached...im a newbie so i've struggling here....i like to combine the eyes to face..i dont animate eyes..
I imported a character model that I downloaded off of the internet into maya, and I have run into a snag as I'm rigging, skin binding, etc. The model has a main body, but its armor is actually separate geometry. My problem is that the shoulder pads and leg armor are mirrored, so that when one moves, the other one does as well, which is a big problem when I want to animate the model. Is there a simple way to split the pieces up so that they are not mirroring each other? My guess is that they were originally created that way so that each side didn't have to be individually worked on.
