Grouping doing my Head in on Maya

[AFK_Matrix]

Ok seems that I am stuck again, sorry for all these posts but no one here knows anything about maya. I did do a search on google but nothing seemed to help.

 

Right I am going through a Battleship tutorial and am doing quite well. But I have go to the part of making a gun turret. So I have used Nurb cylanders to create it etc. All I want to do is group everything together and then duplicate it for multiple turrets. So I highlight all the parts and go to Edit->Group (by parent) but it doesn't move all the bits together? I select everything again or select the group in the Hypergraph and the bits move seperately?? I am going to try again but this method of grouping is sooo frustrating compared to Max where it just worked!!

[richmondlu]

Hello there fellow maya user!

 

Try grouping deleting history and center pivot?

[Elmarq]

you may also want to try this:

 

after you group objects together (and while the group is still selected) open the outliner to see what the group name is. From the outlinerm you can select each group by name and therefore select each item in the group.

 

i have the outliner shortcut on my shelf and keep it open while working with groups. also, if you type group* in the outliner search box it will only list groups.

 

 

edit: i just realized something. on the default UI the fourth icon from the left is called "Select by hierarchy and combinations". clicking this icon will left you select entire groups.

 

http://books.google.com/books?id=ns0kYxhcgzMC&pg=PA36&lpg=PA36&dq=maya+2008+select+groups&source=web&ots=K4sjDu78OS&sig=AeDcPaVR35ZwBnzlocim5aS1jec&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result

Edited January 2, 2009 by Elmarq

[shaneis]

Sorry for the late reply, you need to use "Freeze Transformations" - this will "zero" all the transform, scale and rotation channels for each piece. Select all the pieces for the turret, do "Freeze Transformations", then group it all. Don't center the pivot, it will mess up the way the turret rotates.

 

Maya's grouping system is actually quite good, it inherits transform data which can be quite useful at times. You can also create null nodes by doing two groups. (Select objects, group, group again.)

[richmondlu]

I agree the freeze transformations is a great way of doing that as well. And centering the pivot is easy to change down the road if need to but doing so you can line up the center of the gun to where is needs to go.

 

You run into this a lot with doing head deformers when you try to duplicate things that are not parented in the original head. they all use there own axis so yes the freezing transformations will work as well as group delete history.

Edited January 7, 2009 by richmondlu

[shaneis]

...centering the pivot is easy to change down the road if need to but doing so you can line up the center of the gun to where is needs to go.

 

When you create a group node, the pivot for that group is centered by default and considering it's a gun turret, you'd have to move the pivot to the center of the turret's pillar (barbette) in X and Z. Another way around this would be to create a joint (bone) and rig all the parts to that using Rigid Binding. All the parts will inherit the transforms of the joint, in this case you would group the barrels for easy control, group the other parts + barrelsGroup select both groups and bind it to the rig... although this may be a little complex, it's the way I prefer to control more complex machinery. The main benefit being that you only need to maneuver the joint and as a result, you don't accidently mess up the transforms of the individual parts. Even better, as the joint's transforms start at zero regardless of the actual angle in world space, it is very easy to return the rig to it's original position at any time without the worry of unknowingly altering the transforms of individual parts. You can also make a cool little controller away from the model

 

EDIT: N.B. AFK_Matrix, you don't need to go this far with a simple turret, just group the barrels together and then select the remaining parts, then the barrel group and group again - once you've frozen the transforms on everything, of course.

 

To make a simple controller for the turrets, create a NURBS circle somewhere away from the model, freeze it's transforms and delete it's history, then create an expression to relate the circle's rotation to the turret's... (there's a few ways to do this but I find this to be the most direct).

 

Select the turret group, then right-click the RotateY channel, choose "Expressions...". In the new window that opens, write the expression like this (note how I have done the spaces - very important)...

 

turretGroup.rotateY = nurbsCircle.rotateY

 

Now, you can also link all the turrets to the NURBS circle in the same way.

Edited January 7, 2009 by shaneis