@sw00000p

To be honest, I am already kicking myself.  I could have been so much further along by now......

Tim

There are surely times when it is good to be stubborn.  Knowing when is the gift of experience.

@sw00000p

I guess my preaching to choir is more about =If I can't see it and control it, I don't have an understanding of what it is doing.

To that end, I created groups in Hexagon for the core modules, edited all of the pivot points in 3dXchange and set my texture colours there.

What I did in IClone was double click to load my modules where they were supposed to go and then add the physics for the animation pieces that I wanted to add.  Because of what I did before starting IClone, everything worked as I was expecting it should.  There were no surprises or weird things like parts flipping.

The physics is new to me and I want to learn it.  If I understand things correctly, I should be able to create a library of motions that I can save outside of my model and reuse in other projects.  I like the idea of pre-saved blocks that I can place on the timeline for mechanical constructs.  I really don't want to take the time is takes to plug in key frames for things that are just basic movement.

I will look into lynda and digital tutors and see what the pricing is relative to my budget.

What I took a minimum of three days to almost get working, I did start to finish today in less than an hour, including the landing gear and covers, by using Hexagon and 3dXchange to prep my objects before loading the model into IClone6.  That's a big leap forward in my book.

best,

Tim

There are surely times when it is good to be stubborn.  Knowing when is the gift of experience.

@primaveranz

Hi, Thanks for your input.  When I was discussing the pivot point, it was relative to the objects on the screen.  There was no animation at that time.  The observation is that I can set my pivot point exit the edit, check the translate info on another object, and then go back to the translate on the original object that I changed the pivot point on, and the act of changing the pivot point will have altered the data in the translate section, which I am suggesting should not be happening.

As an observation, I can take my motor assembly, click on edit pivot, and then enter the data in the pivot point section for each of the 4 items, and then click to close the window.  It will keep the data in each of the items I changed.  I haven't tried different data in each, but the same data in each saves properly.

Best,

Tim

There are surely times when it is good to be stubborn.  Knowing when is the gift of experience.

Re the Edit Pivot info changing when you click on something else and come back, I just want to check that you know the "Edit Pivot" button is a "Toggle", i.e. you click it once, edit the values and then click it again to "set" them. I suspect if the rotation direction is changing by 90 degrees when you press play, that you might not have been on frame 1 when you set the values, you can check this obviously by expanding the timeline down to the frame level and checking where the start keyframe is.
Re the props stopping rotating - are you sure you haven't just reached the last frame in the animation? Also set the props hinges to "free" i.e. not between a degree range.

I have added my propeller assemblies and added hinges to them with the motors as the targets.  

I now have a perfectly animated wing assembly with two rotating motors that transition from vertical to horizontal.  Each of those motors has a rotating propeller which tracks perfectly with the motor.

For some reason I am having problems applying my colour textures on some parts.  (No, there is no reason I can think of)

My propellers stop rotating when the motors reach horizontal and stop.  Should they be kinematic instead of dynamic?  I don't want to break anything just yet since it took so long to make it work.  Starting with the wing instead of the propellers seems like it was a good idea for me.

Thanks

Tim

There are surely times when it is good to be stubborn.  Knowing when is the gift of experience.

I spent some time in 3DXChange and edited / set my pivot point for every object and assembly.  That point is its actual position in 3d space.

I created a new document in IClone6.  This time I started with my wing assembly, rather than the propellers.  Starting at the fixed point closest to the root.  

I attached each of the sub parts of the motor to the motor shell.  I attached the motor to the wing assembly.  I selected the motor and added a hinge.  Learned something here.  You cannot set the target as the wing unless you first go into the physics option for the wing and activate physics.  My physics on the motor is set as dynamic since nothing happened when it was set as Kinematic.  I set my force.  

Both of my motors are perfectly animated.  Nothing flipped and nothing misbehaved.

Question:  In 3DXChange I highlighted the 4 objects that make up the motor.  I have the option "export selected" chosen and exported to IClone6.  In IClone6, there is a heading for the motor in the scene list.  Below it are the 4 objects.  One of the 4 objects is the motor shell that I attach everything to.  Why is there an extra object in the scene list that I neither want nor need that had my objects attached to it by default?

best,

Tim

There are surely times when it is good to be stubborn.  Knowing when is the gift of experience.

@sw00000p

Thanks for jumping in.  I was wondering where you had gotten to :)

• Local Space - Set pivot point.
(FREEZE TRANSFORM)....ZERO OUT POSTION AND ROTATION
...this does not mean the prop is setting in the center of the world where (X = 0, Y = 0, Z = 0)
This means... no matter where you place the object.... its Positional and Rotational LOCAL value is ZERO.
ALL Props using THIS..... All Animation MATCHES UP PERFECTLY!
Don't take the time to learn this....
You are asking for trouble!
Animating "Multiple Pivot Points" ...ALL PROPS SHOULD START WITH ZERO Pos and Rot values.
An extremely FAST way to animate ANYTHING!
Using numbers other than zero... IS INSANE   and the Wrong Way to learn animation![/quote]

Ok, you are preaching to the choir here, meaning that I completely agree and need no convincing.  I need to know how to take control of this either in IClone or before I get there.  I have noticed in IClone that I change an objects' orientation using the "Edit Pivot".  I expect that to be the only thing that I am changing, but it is not.  I can go up to the "Transform" data (or usually come back after doing something else that is on a different part even, and when I look at the "Transform" data, it is not what it was when I last looked at it.  The whole key for me might just lie in understanding the difference between the transform data and the edit pivot data.  To my way of thinking, if I set the Pivot data, I am defining the location of the actual point in 3d space upon which everything I do with that object is defined.  I set up the orientation of the object as well.  If I then keyframe a rotation in my animation, that rotation will be along the axis of my choice, for the number of degrees of rotation and that's all there is.  Only the rotation data of the pivot point will change.  If I want to transform the object I move it along the axis of my choice.  The pivot point will move along that axis by the amount / distance that I had entered.

Why would my Transform data change in IClone6 when I have adjusted the pivot point of the object?  Changing the pivot point does not move the object, nor change it's rotation in 3d space.

Please help

Tim

There are surely times when it is good to be stubborn.  Knowing when is the gift of experience.

@ rampa

Thanks for the link.  I am always looking for sources.  It may be the same model, but mine came from blendshare.  I appreciate your offer to send me a copy.  I have no reason for doing this other than personal learning, and accepting a finished model would defeat my purpose , though likely save me much frustration.

@all
It is very clear to me that things are not as they appear.  I have a logical perspective and modeling is not new to me.  I can examine this model in detail in Hexagon and in 3DXChange, and I actually have spent a number of hours doing just that, either to group things or look at pivot points, or experiment.

Without a doubt, dealing with the motor as a single entity rather than four distinct parts led me to discover that the motor in that case was treated by IClone as the source of the pivot points.  When I broke up the motor by "Detaching" the parts from the assembly I originally failed to see that the parts retained their original pivot points and not the pivot point of the motor.  Ok, I fixed that.  

What I do not have an explanation for is why the spinner (as 1 example and the body of the motor as a 2nd example) rotated 90 degrees from their origin when I applied the hinge.  I do know that these two items were the items that the hinge was attached to.  There was no indication in the rotation or transform or pivot point that they were any different than the other objects in each of the respective assemblies.  Yes, I detached the other assembly parts, rotated the part that flipped and reset the pivot point.  I then reset the hinge data back to what it was before I changed it by rotating the part to fix the part flipping issue.  Problem solved, but surely something should have been visible in the rotation data that would have indicated to me that the part was going to flip when the animation ran, or, there is something about the axis information on the hinge that I am missing.

In the Limit section of the modify panel for the hinge, the first box says Rotation and it has the fields that default to -90 and +90.  Why is the Axis: always X?  That would explain my object flip since I am trying to rotate along Y.  I have discovered no way to change the Axis that shows here, which implies that I need to change it in the object before I get here.  

When I look at the motor that rampa set up for me, I realized that my issue was trying to select the target for the hinge from my scene list which does not work.  Selecting from the scene list works for everything else, so I don't understand why it doesn't work to select the target for the hinge.

Clearly, there is something unique in how the hinge treats objects and the information that it does and does not display.  The manual is of no help.  It says that you line it up and the miracle happens.  In using the motor as the target and the spinner as the parent, how do I control the actual rotation attached to the target?  I want to control the speed of the rotation from vertical to horizontal, and I need to be able to control the rotation so that it is bi-directional.  With the animation being kinematic, there is no force applied.  I did see an option in the timeline, (although I can't recall exactly where), that specifically says it will reverse the direction (or create the opposite of what the current animation is) from the animation block that is created by using the physics tool instead of keyframing.  I haven't gotten there yet, but I will look in the manual to see if I can get any useful insights there.

In short, what is touted as the method to simplify the process is not documented to clearly stated how it works or what it is actually doing.

best,

Tim

There are surely times when it is good to be stubborn.  Knowing when is the gift of experience.

@primaveranz

Thanks.  I understand how to clone the object, but in this case, the actual motor has vents and scoops, so it has to be a mirror image.

best,

Tim

There are surely times when it is good to be stubborn.  Knowing when is the gift of experience.

I had to separate the propellers. The original had them as one object.

So a few more minutes. ;)

But the iClone part was just dropping in two hinge constraints to be the motors. You might want to upgrade from iClone 3, or whatever.