Making objects follow a Conveyor Belt?

SuperSparkplug

Hi there,

In an animated project I'm working on, I want an object to follow a conveyor belt at a certain point. The conveyor belt is a simple long cube with ramp texture controlled by a moving place3dTexture node. When an object falls on the conveyor belt, I want to constrain it to the place3dTexture node so it moves with the conveyor belt.

However, attempts to do so haven't worked so well. I have tried directly point and parent constraining the object to that node and while I can make it follow the belt, it immediately displaces itself according to the node's animation. It does not start from the point I want it to move from, even when I animate the Blend Point to affect the object at the point of contact. It does not maintain the desired object's offset. I've had a lot of weirdness happen trying to do this, but no success.

Any ideas on how to do this properly?

Software: Maya 2019

System: Mac OS

throttlekitty

Putting the software in the thread title can be a very helpful thing for you and everyone else reading. You left clues in the post at least.

Basic stuff first, did you check Maintain Offset when creating the constraints?

SuperSparkplug

throttlekitty said:

Putting the software in the thread title can be a very helpful thing for you and everyone else reading. You left clues in the post at least.

Basic stuff first, did you check Maintain Offset when creating the constraints?

Updated with software.

Maintain Offset was checked. It mainly concerns the X translate since that's what's moving. As soon as the Blend Point is keyed enabled, it immediately jumps to another position along moving path of the place3DTexture1 node and does not continue from its original position.

throttlekitty

FYI, you can add extra targets to a constraint at any time, just constrain as usual and maya adds them to an existing constraint node.

I'm going to guess that you set the constraint from your object dropper and place3dTexture to the object to be dropped at the same time, so the offset for the place3d is based on wherever the constraint was made, not on the conveyor belt cube. This is the weird pop that you're getting. So you can either remake the constraint, or manually adjust the offset in the Attribute Editor, under the Parent Constraint Target Offsets header.

I just stepped through this myself, and found it necessary to cheat with some tweaks on the offset because i'm a garbage animator, I still had some pop during the pass from my locator to the place3d.