Fellow animators,

I am trying to whip up an animation that fires a single projectile from say, a gun. What I did was to create an action from the choreography with the projectile flying along the z-axis and exporting it as an action. Now, the trouble I run into is when I want to point it somewhere else. How can I get the projectile to fly along its OWN z-axis and not that of the Choreography?

Grayson

If i understand you right.

maybe constrain it to a path.

could be wrong though.

Probably should work the way you describe but...

Create a parent bone... just one... that is a parent to the "bullet".

The action or pose moves the child bone... but the parent bone is the one you "point".

Actually... this is the same concept of the model bone... If you rotate the model bone to point in another direction the shoot action should move that "bullet" bone in it's own space... relative to wherever the model bone is.

Are you changing the position of the model bone when you "point it"? Or are you rotating the "bullet"?

Vernon "!' Zehr

I was actually just thinking of doing the parent bone technique. Using it as a sort of launcher. I'm going to experiment with that and see what I can get.

The parent/child bone will work as long as you don't swing the gun around while the bullet is still in motion. But you could use it to whack someone upside the head by whippin' that bullet around from side to side. Bullets tend to move pretty fast from A to B so I'm sure it wouldn't be a problem anyway.

The parent bone technique worked pretty well for what I was doing. I just turned on the cycle function and got a great machine-gun type effect. Thanks for the help.

Hey... don't leave us hanging. Post an image or animation so we can see.
Glad you found your solution.

Rodney

ok, so its not EXACTLY a machine gun...more like a rapidly firing TIE Fighter.
here are some images.

[attachmentid=12636]


[attachmentid=12637]

So why didn't you just create the bullets/laser bolts as their own unique models? Would have been far easier and very simple to animate!

Here's a gun with bullet and muzzle flash example (at least I think I created them all as separate models):
http://www.david-higgins.com/effects.htm

Cheers

I did this a long time ago but I am certain I used the cannon ball as a seperate model.
Not the finished version but size limits makes this the only one I can post.


edit: Okay...can't upload that. I will stick it on my own website and add a link in a few.


Wade

Here it is