Old AM: 8.5L

I have a circle. I want to move it somewhere and I want its center to be on a specific coordinate so that I can perfectly align it. How do I do this? I've looked all over can find nothing that says how.

Thanks for any help.

Welcome to the forum!

I presume you are trying to do this in the model window?

When you group that circle you can look at it's properties in the Properties window.

The "Pivot" shows the current XYZ of the center of the group

Under "Translate" you can type in XYZ values to move the group.

If you want to move the circle center to -4,3,15 type those values into the translate props. They will always say zero after you type in a value.


If there's an existing CP or group you want to move your circle to you can look in its props to find its Pivot's XYZ (write them down) then type those into the Translate props of your circle.

Thanks for responding and thanks for offering help even though I'm on a very old version. I am trying to do this in the Objects->Model window, yes.

I have grouped my circle and in the properties window no "Translate" tab appears. If I leave "group has color" and "render group as lines" unchecked, the only tabs I see for my group properties are Options, Selected CP, Group, and Pivot. I thought maybe I needed to hit the "translate mode" button, but that didn't give me a translate tab either.

This is a bit confusing because in the Help Menu it suggests that there should be a translate tab, but I don't see one.. If I go into "Choreography" mode and look at my model shortcut's properties I can see a translate tab, but not at all in the Model mode/Window.

So much has changed in the interface since v8.5 it's difficult to tell you what to click on. I can't remember what the 8.5 interface even looked like.

You made me do it, I got out my v8 CD. It has Dennis the Dog on it!

The stuff you need is there but with different names.

There is a Properties window that you need to have open.

Select the set of CPs you want to move.

Under the Group tab there are "Offset" values which are the same as the "Translate" values I described before.

Click to view attachment

Wow, I guess v8.5 isn't all that different after all. The only thing radically different appears to be the Properties window.

Note that the values you type into Translate/Offset are distances from the current position.

You can find the current position in the "Pivot values. The distance you want to move is the difference between the pivot values of the point you want to go to and the pivot value of the group you are moving.

Thanks for the help. That gets the job done for me, although not quite as directly as I'd hoped. I bought this years ago for messing around in conjunction with a game I play, but never got into it once I bought it. Started playing the game again and now I'm messing with it again.

Does the *new* AM have a more direct approach to doing what we've done here? Seems like there should be a faster way than having to calculate difference between pivot to the point I want to go to.

Thanks again for the assistance.

Not that I know of. In character modeling modeling it's a fairly rare need so it hasn't been pursued.

When you're in the chor with bones there are constraints to align things, and since you can export what is in the chor as a new model that would be one way to do it if you had to do it quite a bit. But to do it once or twice I think the above maneuver is probably best.

The *new* A:M has a feature where you can drag-select a group, then Shift-click-select an individual control point and move all of them at once to a specified x,y,z coordinate instead of having to calculate the offset between where you are and where you want to be. In the case of a circle, you would create a temporary spline bisecting the circle and hit "Y" to create a Control point in the center. Then drag-select the whole circle. Then Shift-Click on the central control point and type the X, Y and Z coordinates you want to move the center to (all the other selected points will move too).

Does the game you are interested in import directX (.X) models? The *new* version of A:M also has available a free DirectX model and animation exporter.

The game I am messing around with is Myth II: Soulblighter. It is a sprite-based game. I would use AM to make all the models and then have to set up a camera to rotate around the model and make sprite images from every view.

It also uses some implementation of 3DMF that apparently only one software (Meshworks) can properly create and export. Unfortunately the 3DMF has to be then read by another very old application that is only available in Mac OS 9 to be converted to something Myth can read.

The moving groups by an individual control point sounds nice. Too bad there doesn't seem to be an upgrade path for my version of AM.

Anyway, thanks again for the help.

That sounds cool. We'd love to see something of that, particularly once you've gotten it in the game environment. Maybe a screencam movie or something.




a mere $79 for the one year license version!

Ah but what if I did like with this version? Bought it and then didn't want to use it again for a couple of years. I like to buy my software and have it be available forever without internet requirement.

you can still buy the CD-version.

It`s 299,-$ as I remember correctly....