If you're using polygon islands, then you're essentially doing deformations on a single mesh. In which case the centers will not maintain alignment with each island because what you're seeing are not the centers of the islands, but temporary manipulators. This is normal and expected behavior.
Your best option is to split each polygon island into it's own object so you can control them independently as objects. If you insist on keeping them as polygon islands, a simple solution would be to create nulls to act as the centers of the polygon islands and assign the polygon islands to the nulls via an envelope. You can then weight each vertex of each island 100% to it's assigned null. Your ICE Tree would then push the nulls around and the islands would simply tag along for the ride. Matt From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Eric Lampi Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2012 12:03 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Polygon Island orientation Is there any way to change a polygon island's center axis without moving the points on the attached instances? In the original geo, the points are oriented properly as are the original center points are pointing where I needed them, but since I am now using ICE to push them around, the particle points that are generated from the merged geo that the poly islands come from all orient global 0,0,0. Which was fine up until I was asked to constrain their orientation so that they Y axis is always pointed at the surface underneath. So they need to orient flat along the surface, like how they start out in example 1, example 2 shows what's happening as they fly away from the surface, their orientation does not stay flat. In example 3 you can see what happens when I orient the axis towards the globe's surface, they all flip. So I am a little stuck. After digging into the nodes I haven't found a place where I can make any changes to the orientation of the axis without the instances also flipping. Thoughts? Thanks, Eric -- Freelance 3D and VFX animator
