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Mirror animations?

TheMegaTop said:
I tried your tutorial out and developed some worse case scenarios. I made a really crazy complex animation of a landing gear and used compared to the information on your tutorial.

At first, I could not get the animation to mirror correctly at all. I tried everything in my arsenal and I could pretty much conclude that I would probably have to redo it on the other side.

Then I tried your tutorial, following the idea you are showing in it. I must say, it worked like a charm! I couldn't believe it was that EASY. Some of us TRY to hard, I know I was.

Thanks for that man! I'll keep that tut handy when I have trouble mirror animations.

I'll upload the gmax file and post here when I have time.
Click to expand...

I'm still a bit mystified :confused: with what you guys are doing. You are talking about "complex" animations, and to me this would mean mechanical assemblies with multiple members interlinked in Kinematic Chain(s). Those are usually parts with their pivots at the ends (think of the cylinder pushrods) and certainly not with the pivots at their geometric centers. How can you make animations like that?

Perhaps - and I haven't tried this - it is possible to make an assembly, animate it, and THEN re-set the pivots to centers, at which point the above method would work. Is that the case? I can already see a problem with this approach: if you animated a wheel turning to the right (with all the parts), mirroring this would result in the "other side" wheel turning to the left - and that's not what you want. What's needed is the mirrored assembly, but the one which still turns to the right.
 
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No, you're missing the key point...

Only the "master parent" in the hierarchy needs to have the pivot point centered and aligned to the "World" coordinates.

The "master parent" (for want of a better term) is the topmost unanimated part in the hierarchy chain.

In the case of the tutorial's example of a wing, only the wing's pivot must be centered and aligned, as all "children" of the "parent" will inherit their orientation from the "parent."

In the case of a landing gear for example, the topmost node in the hierarchy chain could be the wheelwell geometry, since wheelwells are spatially fixed and unanimated... ;)

For that matter, you could use the fuselage for the "master parent," but typically you'd want to mirror the wheelwell anyway, so why not use it? :D
 
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Hi,

I know this is digging up an old thread, but I am in need of mirroring some flap parts and I searched and found this one. I thought I would post to it to add what I found out so when I need it again I can find it. :)

Bill's tutorial (thanks!) works great for me except for the last step. I have been using local coordinates to animate my flaps, and thus I needed to change the last steps.

In his PDF tutorial, I found out that step #9 (changing the sign of the rotation Z axis) didn't work for me. That threw the flap out of alignment to the wing. What often worked for me was:

9a. Choose Affect Pivot Only (Hierarchy tab)
Choose rotation mode and right click it.
Change the sign of the Z and Y axes.
Unchoose Affect Pivot Only

Now some of my parts animated perfectly. Others still needed some tweaking, but they were mostly pretty close and saved me some time anyway. A few didn't work at all; the pivot point seemed to aimed in a very odd direction and had to be fixed manually. Probably due to some odd thing in the original part.

Thanks,
 
I am also reviving this thread, as I really need to get this method of mirroring to work, and I simply can't get it to work as in the tutorial, which I have tried to duplicate. I believe I have successfully used the technique in the past, but how I did it is presently beyond me.

When I try to duplicate the tutorial with a crude wing shape it starts to go wrong when I mirror the part. Choosing the z-axis results in the object flipping upside down and not flipping from left to right. Everything looks to be set up exactly as in the tutorial, so I can't understand what the problem is. I made sure the pivot point was centred on the object.

Should I post screenshots?
 
The tutorial says to centre it to the object, the screenshot in the tutorial shows the mouse cursor hovering over the centre to object button and there is no button to centre the pivot to the world, so I don't think that can be it.
 
Here's a screenshot after mirroring, with a basic looking part simply to illustrate the problem. I suspect the problem is something very simple, but nonetheless, it isn't apparent to me. You can't see the mirrored part because it is sitting precisely below the original, only flipped upside down:

8126816157_e8c332e98a_h.jpg
 
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Michael, in the mirror modifier's paramters rollout just tick a different axis to get the desired result.
 
No axis gives the desired result. The x-axis will flip it the right way, except if I have tilted the part (as with a wing with dihedral, the mirrored clone will be tilted the wrong way.

I need to understand why my parts don't flip in the same way as in the tutorial. Every piece of the aircraft has to be mirrored and this method is supposed to allow me to do it simply with a just a few mouse clicks and key strokes. I can fiddle around with each part and get it right eventually, but the loss of productivity would add up to many, many hours, especially when animations are involved.
 
Here is another screenshot with all three views. Here, the x-axis is selected as this at least flips the part the right way. It would still need to be rotated after it's relocated by changing the sign on it's X-location.

Has anyone ever mirrored a part into it's correct orientation without having to rotate it afterwards? Does Bill's method actually work? Has anyone mirrored a part across the longitudinal axis of the aircraft by selecting the Z axis?

I'm not sure why I should ensure the pivot is oriented to world coordinates, because the part always flips about it's local axis in any event, as you can see in the screenshot.

I am at my wits end with this issue. I would dearly love to easily and quickly mirror parts, but it simply doesn't work.

8129728653_02cc489b28_h.jpg
 
Ah ok.
Mirroring in world space works flawless only if the part as a whole has not been rotated, meaning that the object is still aligned to world coordinates.
To come around this go to the utilities tab, hit "reset x-form" and apply the mirror modifier on top of it.
 
Thanks for the explanation -- that solves the problem for me if I mirror on the X-axis. I am still a bit mystified as to why the tutorial specifies the z axis, but that seems a more academic than practical concern at this point.
 
Michael2 said:
Thanks for the explanation -- that solves the problem for me if I mirror on the X-axis. I am still a bit mystified as to why the tutorial specifies the z axis, but that seems a more academic than practical concern at this point.
Click to expand...
Mostly that has to do with how you initially set up the World Space Coordinates.
 
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