Delay animation

[gfunk]

anyone care to share their techniques for creating automated secondary motion in maya? in simple terms, lets say i have a sphere and a cone and i want the cone to follow the cube, but delayed, and relative in space. i know how to do this by creating a cache node and buffering the XYZ translation values for a given number of frames and drawing those values from the cache and pumping then into the following object, but this seems like overkill. is there an easier way? preferable an interactive solution as opposed to runtime goal weights and such.

thanks

[verybad]

I suggest to Make the cone a active ridgid body, and attach a Drag-field to it... Then parent the dragfield to the sphere (or cube?)And animate the sphere (or cube.)

hope this is what you meant,
meik

PHONK
imagenetix, visual dekonstruktionz, soundmutations
www.v2.nl/~meik

[tcc]

Screw the rigid body stuff. Use an expression:
// Create an "offsetTime" and "offsetValue" (or whatever you want to call them) float attr on the cone. The offsetTime attr sets the frame delay in time of the offset which you can keyframe of course and is available to you in the channel box. The offsetValue attr can be used to add/subtract from the value that is coming from the cube so you can get some variation if you need it.

---

string $offsetTime = cone.offsetTime ;
string $offsetValue = cone.offsetValue ;
cone.tx = getAttr -time (frame - $offset ) cube.tx + $offsetValue ;

You of course can use this expression for any attr you want, this is just for trans X.

Good Luck.
Tim

[verybad]

what exactly is the advantage of such an expression?
(sorry for this stoopid question, but i'm not so good in expressions)
(and please don't say 'screw', it sounds a bit rude)

PHONK
imagenetix, visual dekonstruktionz, soundmutations
www.v2.nl/~meik

[gfunk]

first, thanks to tim for the expression- this is similar to what i had been doing, but it is a little more streamlined than building a cache node and getting the values from those nodes. not sure if it is as quick in calculation. one note, i believe that your "string" declarations should be floats since you are getting numerical values from those fields.
as far as why use exp over dynamics, i believe it is faster and more predictable to make an absolute expression. on the downside, it might be a bit more robotic and perfect (which would be a negative in organic applications).
finally, the solution i'm looking for would be more dynamic, operating in real time as i drag the "parent" node in space- all of these solutions require keyframes to be set for any "delay" data to be gathered and piped into the "children." is there even a way to do such a thing? it might require a scriptjob.
anyway, thanks for the input.

[tcc]

You're right about the string declarations, they should be floats. Sorry Meik about the "screw", no harm meant by it. Rigid body stuff can get you some good motion without keyframing. I find that custom attributes along with variables in expressions are incredibly helpful in streamlining character animation. For me it is more direct and portable, I always know what is connected to what. I usually like to put all the expressions for one character under a single node so I have one place to go for editing my character controls.
Yeah, sounds like you're looking for some runtime solution much like the particle runtime stuff. There is some interesting stuff like what you're saying with the PaintFX stuff. Dragging stuff around interactively and the secondary motion of strokes happening real time, check into that. I have just started using script jobs but haven't used anything yet that gets evaluated on the fly. Good luck.