Maya for 3D Printing - Rapid Prototyping
In this course we're going to look at something a little different, creating technically accurate 3D printed parts.
# 1 03-01-2013 , 11:08 PM
mayauser5's Avatar
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 5

Motion Path Issue

Hey guys

I want to animate a word of 3 letters in Maya. Each letter is an object, and I have grouped these 3 objects. The word (that's to say the group of the 3 objects) is gliding along a motion path - until here all works fine. But now I want that while the word is moving along the motion path the space between the 3 letters grows constantly (as an additional optical effect) - in other words the distance between the 3 letter-objects should increase while gliding along the motion path. I don't know how to do this. I tried various ways, but none of them shows a proper result.

In order to show you what I mean I attached some files.

Greets

Attached Files
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# 2 04-01-2013 , 02:25 AM
EduSciVis-er
Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Toronto
Posts: 3,374
I would probably forget about the group and just attach the three letters to the path separately. Key the start and end times of each with the proper offsets.

# 3 04-01-2013 , 08:44 AM
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Join Date: Apr 2008
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That was one of the ways I tryed to obtain the result. The problem I encountered there was the letters not being on the same height when I attached them to the motion path. I could fix this problem now by moving the pivot points of the tree letters to the same level. It seems to work like this.
Thanks very much for your reply!


Last edited by mayauser5; 04-01-2013 at 08:48 AM.
# 4 06-01-2013 , 09:46 AM
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Join Date: Dec 2012
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Moving the pivot points should work as you stated.

another way you could have done it was to make a controller for each of the objects (a circle if you like.) and parent each object to the circle then hook the circle up to the path.

with this you should be able to move/set the high for each of the letters because there location should be independent of the parent which is locked to the path.

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