So, thanks to the help of those on the forum in reminding me of a couple of old tricks, I cooked up something for my return to animating.

My problem is that I have two teams of 7 that I would like to place and move about on the inner surface of a cylinder. So, to make my life a little easier, I did the following:

-Made 14 "pointer" bones for the cylinder.
-Made a Constrain to Surface constraint with a separate pointer bone assigned to each player.

Now, I wanted to deal with laying people out on a flat version of the cylinder's surface (just easier to think that way), and so I made up 14 nulls to place on a control grid. This control grid related the location of the null relative to its surface to the pointer bones via two Expressions:





So, the end result is that when I diagram the positions of players on my 2d grid, they appear at the appropriate part of the cylinder.

"Rendezvous with Rama"?

I'm thinking more like "NFL Blitz 2050."

That's a neat trick.

Random technical addition:

I was also going to be clever and add Coriolis effect to the motions of my players (since the station would be rotated for gravity). Problem is that my designed station is too small to generate any useful gravity. At the spin rates necessary to get any decent artificial gravity, all of my poor astronauts would get horribly sick (Coriolis effect in the inner ear is a human factor to worry about when design artificial gravity through spinning).

Has anyone determined if the spacestation in 2001 was slow enough?