Problem with POPs picking up animation?

[DaJuice]

I'm afraid this will turn out to be another stupid question from Your's Truly, but why is it that POPs can't read animation from geometry animated at the object level? For example: Create a box, go back to the Object level and set a keyframe, now animate the box rotating or something. Go into POPs, lay down a Source POP and play back the animation. Nothing. It doesn't move at all in the POP viewer (not for me at least).

Now, redo the animation, but instead of setting the keyframes for the box at the Object level, do it at the SOP level. Now when you play back the animation in POPs it works just fine.

Am I just missing something?

[renderfox]

You must use the ObjectMerge SOP to import object level animation

Look at contrail tutorial on techimage site

[anakin78z]

The problem lies in 'transform spaces'. You see, it's grabbing the locations from sops. If you animate your object, it doesn't change the locations in sops. If you hit 'p' in the viewport (to get the pop network parameters) you can specify a transform object. Honestly, I've never quite been able to wrap my head around the whole concept. Try this though for kicks:

Animate a box on object level. Add a force object on object level. Now in pops, specify the box object as a transform object. Hit play, and you'll see that the force object is actually moving around the box object. Strange stuff....

Yep...

-Jens

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Success!!!! I think I figured out what you can do! Instead of specifying the box object as a transform object, add a null on object level and leave it at 0,0,0. Specify it as your transform object, and now you should see the box rotating and the particles behaving as you'd expect!

Woot!

[DaJuice]

Thank you guys for the tips!

Jens, that null trick worked good.