I am working on a new ship model (for an upcoming animation) that is to use thrust vectoring. I have used bones and expressions to make one engine have the inverse pitch of the other. This would be sufficient if I were only going for making a sprite. However, I want to do a full 3D animation, and I want the engines to respond not to key frames, but to the change in banking. Thus, I want to write an expression that relates the pitch of the engines to the change in banking a certain number of frames ahead (thus I need to get the pitch expressions of the bones to relate to the derivative of the ship's banking channel a few frames ahead). I could write this mathematically, but I can't seem to figure out how to enter this into the expression editor. The other thing that I want to do is to relate the pitch of the bones (of the engines) to the derivative of the pitch a few frames ahead of the current position (this would make the engines point up or down together to pitch the craft up or down). Once again my problem is the same, I do not know how to put this into the expression editor.
If anyone knows how (perhaps you pipeline, you did the Starbridge's thrust vectoring), or if anyone knows a book or website that could tell me this, please, inform me. I am very eager to get this to work.
Joe

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I got it, if anyone wants my technique, let me know.
Joe

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Uh. I have no clue what the heck you're talking about, but nova's banking frames just aren't that complicated. There's just bank left, and bank right. There's no degree of bank based on how hard you're turning, just left, right, and straight. All you need is one straight rotation, one rotation banking left, and one rotation banking right. That's all. If you're using bones and expressions (I don't know why you'd need them), then just make one have a negative rotation as the other has a positive rotation. Other than that, it's really not much more complicated.

Matrix

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"Nothing is fool-proof to a sufficiently talented fool."

Not talking about nova, just lightwave, and I know how to bank ships, I was doing a thrust vectoring ship, where the jets changed pitch to make rolling other manuevering more quick (think starbridge's engines), but I am not talking about a sprite, I am doing it in a full animation (like my last post in the image board), which makes things more complicated, but I think I have it all worked out now.
joe

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Quote

Originally posted by jdh545:
**Not talking about nova, just lightwave, and I know how to bank ships, I was doing a thrust vectoring ship, where the jets changed pitch to make rolling other manuevering more quick (think starbridge's engines), but I am not talking about a sprite, I am doing it in a full animation (like my last post in the image board), which makes things more complicated, but I think I have it all worked out now.
joe

**

Ah, well. You didn't specify that, sorry.

Matrix

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"Nothing is fool-proof to a sufficiently talented fool."