Keyable pivot point placement?

[-undertow-]

One of the cool things Character Studio has is the ability to change the pivot point's placement of, say a foot, on a keyframe basis.
Is it possible to set up a pivot point to be animatable in Maya?

EDIT: Or what about something like XSI's reference object where you can rotate a certain object while using another object's pivot.
I guess you could do this with Maya 5's Parent Constraint (if it works how i think/hope it does) and some set driven keys.

[wcy93]

you can use another object's pivot to rotate an object with any version of maya. just parent the object you're animating to object you want to use as a pivot, rotate it into place, and unparent it. if you've got autokey on as well, it will automatically key all neccesary channels. that functionality has been around forever i think.

as for keying pivot points, I've only ever tried writing an expression to change the pivot point on the fly, but I can't see why animating it wouldn't work. you could even try plugging the translate of say a locator into the pivot attribute of an object, so that you could just grab an object, move it, and you're foot (or whatever it is you're animating) will then rotate around that point.

[-undertow-]

I can't parent a bone to another object when it's already in a bone hierachy and a skin's bound to a mesh.

I'll have a look at constraining a pivot point to a loctor, but i dunno how it'll work. I also think you cannot change the pivot point of a bone without it draging weighted vertices with it.

[wcy93]

yeah thats probably all true. I personally never animate bones directly. I usually have some sort of control object animating my rigs. makes things just a little more customisable. y'know, means I can more easily change rig setups, heirarchies, etc, as well as changing bone counts, without disturbing animation.

anyway, the constraining a rotate pivot to an object works fine. just remember, on the target object, delete the two green connections going to the constraint node. with that done, everything should work fine. oh yeah, the expression method works as well.

[joojaa]

theres a realy good tutorial on aw that demostrates the use of animating the pivot... look for the rolling cube tutorial!

[-undertow-]

Ok, i'll look into it. Thanks

[-undertow-]

Great! That box tutorial really helped! Thanks again!