3DsMax [Rigging] is point helper necessary ?

Zzam_W

Okay,

First of all thank you for taking your time visiting my simple thread

Just a quick question everyone,

Is poin helper necessary ? when we could located pivot directly to
object then do orientation / position constraint to control curve
without any poin helper ?

Thank you, I need some advice from experienced user

Deathstick

I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to do but if you're say, just animating a rigid body (rotating/transforming/scaling an entire model) from the same orientation all of the time then you don't really need a point helper.

Point helpers can be useful for parenting while preserving the orientation of your pivot point. IE, say you want a box to be picked up by a crane arm and moved around by it before being dropped off on a conveyor belt or some such craziness.

I might be forgetting something as this is off the top of my head from a long time ago, but you could parent the box to the point helper and the point helper to the crane arm and enable or disable the point helper at various stages on the timeline, in order to have the box smoothly get grabbed by the crane arm and moved, and then "detach" from the crane arm and continue on its way.

There's probably someone else that might be able to explain whatever it is you're looking for, but if you can do whatever your animation requires without a point helper, then I don't think having one is necessary. It should basically depend on whether or not you need your pivot point preserved for other things.

Zzam_W

Hello Mr. Deathstick

Thank you for your reply,

1. my basic knowledge about helper :

as I read about helper, it's defined as mirror object, which connecting between control curve to animated object which has different orientation pivot to prevent any issue when animate the object (in my case bones)

It seems poin helper as mirroring object which "HELP" linking two object with different orientation pivot, is it true ?

2. what I actually learnt from Youtube :

actually, I am learning rigging recently, and doing trial with FK (forward kinematic) for arms,
I saw a video that explained the way to do FK (in Youtube) the FK control curve was attached
directly to the oriented constrained Inside (at the tip of each bones) part of arm (arm, elbow, wristhand)

3. posted picture description :

which I did the different way, placed the FK control curve outside (floating on top of each part) the part of arm (w/o helper) like I did with shoulder (w/ helper), as far I did skin and animate the arms everything "seems" okay.

Zzam_W

Deathstick wrote: »

I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to do but if you're say, just animating a rigid body (rotating/transforming/scaling an entire model) from the same orientation all of the time then you don't really need a point helper.

Point helpers can be useful for parenting while preserving the orientation of your pivot point. IE, say you want a box to be picked up by a crane arm and moved around by it before being dropped off on a conveyor belt or some such craziness.

I might be forgetting something as this is off the top of my head from a long time ago, but you could parent the box to the point helper and the point helper to the crane arm and enable or disable the point helper at various stages on the timeline, in order to have the box smoothly get grabbed by the crane arm and moved, and then "detach" from the crane arm and continue on its way.

There's probably someone else that might be able to explain whatever it is you're looking for, but if you can do whatever your animation requires without a point helper, then I don't think having one is necessary. It should basically depend on whether or not you need your pivot point preserved for other things.

I posted detail picture, forgot to quote, I don't know if my reply message will pop up to your notification or not.