Orienting objects to others in maya

SkullboX · Mar 2007

I've been using maya for a while now and it's an amazingly powerful tool especially for animation.

However I can't seem to find any tool in maya that lets me orient objects to others. I'm not talking about the orient constraint since I don't wat to constain anything. I just want to make sure two objects are perfectly aligned and share the same local axis orientation before constraining anything, so I can easily control joints with control objects without worrying about bad rotations which are messing up my rig right now.

Max does have this easy option of orienting objects, here's what I'm talking about in max. It's not about the translation, just the rotation.

If anyone knows how to do this in maya or a clean workaround, or even a plugin that'd be awesome. Thanks in advance!

SkullboX · Mar 2007

Nevermind the awnser is extremely obivous, but when doing the same in max (pre version 6 at least) would cause your rig to callapse. Simply applying an orient constaint without maintaining offset and then deleting the constraint afterwards worked perfectly.

Malekyth · Mar 2007

There is also this script at highend3d, that appears to be an update to an older script I once used, that mimicks that functionality. I presume, without looking at the MEL, that it's just macroing the constraint-delete constraint method.

Shawner · Mar 2007

I wrote a similar type script using xform to mimic the 3DS style if you're instersted.
Cheers

Orienting objects to others in maya

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