I have a nurbs vulture that I added paint fx feathers to. It is too big to use in a scene that I want to import it into. I've been trying different ways to parent and group the feather strokes to the root group etc. so that it would scale with the body correctly with no luck. The feathers either seem to stay nearly the same size and just bunch up and/or the strokes leave the nurbs surface. I need to scale them down to 20% of what they are now.
This is what I've got so far:
I have a LOT of strokes of feathers. Theres 7 body pieces skinned to a skeleton. Theres no IK.
I've grouped the feathers. I've grouped the root of the skeleton to itself so that the body and the skeleton scale together correctly. I dont' know what else to do. There was a post about a year ago concerning basically the same thing and someone named Joojaa seemed to think an expression was needed. His explanation is listed below. I don't get what he is saying. I need to be nursed step by step because I have no experience to speak of with mel. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Jooja's post:
okay im feeling a bit lazy here this is VERY quick and dirty way to bind the object with its parent object, its a bit sloppy and has no cheeck and uses a expression node for each separately (this east some time) theres atleast 2 more elegant ways to do this.
CODE
{// select pfx to affect by their first obj scale
$pfxShape=listRelatives(ls("-sl"));
for ($shape in $pfxShape){
$obj=listConnections -t shape $shape;
$brush=listConnections -t brush $shape;
expression -s ($brush[0]+".globalScale="+
getAttr ($brush[0]+".globalScale")+
"*("+$obj[0]+".scaleX+"+$obj[0]+
".scaleY+"+$obj[0]+".scaleZ)/3");
}
}
Usage: select the pfx objects on screen you want to bind to their parents scale (note its the average scale so doing non propoetional trasform will cause interesting effects) In reality theres no deed to read 3 values i just tought it could be fun to do so!