I posted this up on tech-artists.org, but I figured someone here may also
have an idea (so, my apologies for those of you who will be seeing this
twice).

*Briefly, the problem is that I cannot figure out what the aimConstraint's
offset attribute is actually doing mathematically*. If you look at the Maya
documentation, it says:

*Offset*

Specifies an offset position (translate X, Y, and Z) for the constrained
> object relative to the target point. Note that the target point is the
> position of the target object’s rotate pivot, or the average position of the
> rotate pivots of the target objects. Default values are all 0.


This is of course rubbish, and the the offset value is in fact some kind of
Euler angle offset. On an orientConstraint, for instance, the offset
attribute is simply a post-rotation of Euler angles using the rotateOrder of
the object being constrained. As such, a constrained object's rotation is
something like: worldSpaceConstraintRotation * offsetRotation

*On an aimConstraint, however, you get this result only when the constrained
object has a rotateOrder of XYZ*. If using any other rotateOrder, you get
some other result, and I haven't managed to reverse-engineer it successfully
to figure out what's going on. I pasted two short scripts on my tao thread
that demonstrate the problem:

http://tech-artists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1512

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can offer!

-- 
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