Extracting rigid SOP animation as obj-space transforms for FBX export?

[melazoma]

Hi all,

I have a bicycle travelling across an uneven terrain. I'm using a Ray SOP to stick the bicycle wheels to the ground. (please see attached example hip file)

I can animate the bicycle object and get world space transformations, but the animation of the wheels going up & down to stick to the ground is treated as deformation when exported to FBX.

The bicycle wheels do not deform/bend/squish. Their movements are rigid.

Is there a way to extract the rigid animations of the wheels to the obj level so there is no deformation?

The project I'm working on requires as little--preferably no--deformations since the deformations are saved as vertex caches by the FBX exporter and we can't use that in our interactive program.

I have tried using the object chop to export the transform to another "clean object". However, this method didn't deal very well with rotations in SOP space when the wheels go around a bend in the road.

Any help is appreciated.

exportDeform.hip

Edited December 12, 2009 by melazoma

[kni8_2k]

Hey Melazoma,

 

I was just reading a post that could help you out:

http://forums.odforce.net/topic/2541-extract-sop-animation-to-object-level/

 

so to apply this to your problem, you should separate the two wheels into their own objects. as one wheal may be going up while the other is going down. Unless you want to treat the whole bike as a single transformation in which case you can just duplicate what is in the attached scene in this post.