I downloaded a lightwave mesh for a ship, and imported it into Cinema 4D (with a surprising minimum of hassel).

I then added some rudimentary engine glows, environment lights, etc.

Here's my problem-----when I have only the ship selected, its axis shows up in a certain place. However, when I select both the ship and the engine glows, the axis moves to the new center when the glows are included (they're actually polygons with a fog-texture to give them a glowy look).

This obviously screws up the ship's rotation, because it doesn't rotate around the point that it should.

How do I tell Cinema 4D to use the ship's own axis, but rotate the engine glows around that point as well?

I'm a bit of a 3D modeling newbie----this is only my second ship, and I didn't even model this one (I did the first, though).

If anyone is interested, the ship in question is a Firefly-class transport. Yeah, someone finally finished a mesh for one of those----you can get it from him at Fireflyfans.net.

It would probably help if you grouped it and then moved the pivot point. I'm sorry I can't help more, I'm not very familiar with C4D. But if you know how to do that, I would try that.

This post has been edited by sparky : 08 September 2004 - 05:37 PM

I don't know a thing about C4D, but if it's anything like just about any other decent 3D rendering/animation app out there, you should be able to create hierarchies of linked objects, with one object referred to as the "child" of another object, it's "parent". The child object will follow the parent object as if it were linked to it - it will move with the parent object and will turn about the parent object's pivot point, if you move or rotate the parent object.

The child object can be moved or rotated relative to the parent, but that's not what you're looking for. Simply parenting the flames to the ship (making the ship the parent object and the flames the child) should do what you want.

(edit) Grr...

This post has been edited by Weepul 884 : 08 September 2004 - 06:19 PM

Thanks all, I figured it out.

I had the ship as an entire group, and then I was grouping that group together with the engine glows.

This reduced the "influence" of the ship itself on the position of the axis.

So when I instead added the glows directly into the ship's group, the axis more accurately reflected the center of the ship.

Lindley, on Sep 9 2004, 03:13 AM, said:

Thanks all, I figured it out.

I had the ship as an entire group, and then I was grouping that group together with the engine glows.

This reduced the "influence" of the ship itself on the position of the axis.

So when I instead added the glows directly into the ship's group, the axis more accurately reflected the center of the ship.
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You can actually move the axis of the ship, by moving the point you see in the middle of every object. Create a null object. Everything you place in it will rotate around that points axis. Use teh upper "click thing" to move the point.

If this was very confusive. I´ll upload a picture of it if you want too.. Its essential to know if you ever want to put a ship of axis.