I just happened upon AC3D and am rather blown away by how easy it's been to use in comparison to other tools I've tried to use just as a hobbyist ... happy so far!
I'm trying to do something and my past experience with apps may be hurting me.. or I'm just lame. I have used a few 3D apps but more 2D animation than anything with ToonBoom. I am trying to construct an arm from the chest down to the wrist (just 3 elements to keep it simple) and am a little confused by the combination of hierarchies, grouping and object rotational centers as I understand them when building a character (primarily from my 2D cutout work).
In my mind I see...
Chest
---->Upper Arm
-------->Lower Arm
Based on past experience I would place the upper arm as a child of the chest with it's rotational center * to the inside of the arm and up inside the arm joint, just above the armpit. Then of course the elbow rotational point * would be sorta inside the lower arm's end... of course it would all be jammed together, not like my ascii illustration
Chest ( * Upper arm) ( * Lower arm)
So here is where I get confused. In most apps I've played with I can drag and drop hierarchies and a group is just a logical group. In AC3D I'm getting the perception that grouping
is the hierarchy. Is that accurate? So in my case I'd group the lower arm to the upper, then that group to the chest.
If so, herein lies my next point of confusion. In most of my other apps I'm able to just grab the rotational center and put it anyplace I want. In AC3D my current perception is that it's fixed to the min/max/center extremes of the object. That seems wrong but I'll be darned if I can actually move it myself numerically, or with the mouse. So at this point my grouped object rotational points are bound by the grouped element and nothing lines up the way I desire.
I've performed a quick low flight through the help and searched the forums on rotational centers, but something tells me I'm just overlooking the obvious.
Any help?
Charles