Subtitles of the Movie

The Link Editor Tool is crucial to setting up hierarchies in Animator. A hierarchy is simply a parent object with one or more child objects. As you can see in this project we have a Ring model and a Cube model. The Ring appears below and indented from the Cube object in our Project Window. This tells us that the Ring is a child of the Cube and will follow the Cube within certain parameters. That's where the Link Editor comes in. Before we get too far, I'm going to point out a bit of confusion. The Link Editor Tool appears here in the Toolbar, you'll see the Tool Tip says Link Editor. If I click on that then that Link Window opens up. Let's close it for a second. But I can also access the same tool by going up to the Menu Bar and clicking Hierarchy and selecting Joint Editor. So, the same tool is known by two names: Link Editor, and Joint Editor. For our purposes we're just going to refer to it as Link Editor. Now that the Link Editor is open, we can set up our how our child object acts with its parent. Let's look at the Inherit tab. By default, the child is told to follow its parent's Position and its Rotation, so if I move the parent Cube, the Ring follows with it. Or if I Rotate the Cube, the Ring will also rotate. But if I Scale the Cube the Ring doesn't scale. Back to the Ring and its Link Editor. That's because the Scale option is not checked in the Inherit tab. Now let's check it, go back to the parent and Scale that, and now the Ring scales with the Cube. Let's take another look at the Ring's Link Editor. You can tell the child object to also inherit the parent's visibility, which means if you animate the parent disappearing from the scene the child will also disappear, and Inherent Deformation means you can tell a child to bend or twist, or follow any other deformation, when the parent is deforming. I also want to draw your attention to the Link Type popup menu here. This tells Animator what constraints to apply to the child object. Is it allowed to move around independently? If it is, then you have set Free as the Link Type. Is it allowed to move around side to side and back and forth, but not up and down? If it is, then the Link Type would be set to Planar. From the Top View I can move the Ring around, but if I go to the Front or Side, I can't move the Ring up and down. It will only slide. The different Link Types will limit position or rotation, or some combination of both. Another very important feature of the Link Editor is setting the Pivot Point. In the Window Pane to the right you can drag around the Pivot Point to anywhere on your object. This will set the point that your object rotates and scales from. Let's open our Gear scene again and select a Gear and now we'll open up the Link Editor for the Gear. If I drag around the Pivot Point I can rotate the Gear but now it'll rotate off-center. The same thing for Scale. It's scaling from the bottom instead of the center of the object, because that's where I told the Pivot Point to be. If I go back to the Link Editor and set the Pivot Point back to the middle, now it scales from its center, or rotates around its center, like it did before we moved it. Let's take a look at another important tool. The Model Access Editor lets you switch the orientation of your model Ð switch up with down, et cetera. This tool can also be accessed by going to the Toolbar here. First you select the model. There's the Access Editor. Or, you can go to the Menu Bar, select Hierarchy, and select Access Editor this way, or keyboard shortcut Command-Shift-A. This is an important tool used mostly when you first bring in a model because it can fix upside down or inverted models. Remember the option to Switch the X-Z axes when importing a DXF file? This does that and more. In this scene my Gear has been imported already, but is lying flat on its back. That's not what I want. I know that I want the Gear to be standing up, so I need the Height of the model to run along the Y-axis, not the Z. So, one click of the Exchange Y and Z button and my model is fixed. You can also click other buttons to exchange other axes, or reverse one of the axes so the object is facing the other way. These are not parameters that you can animate, though. This tool is simply an Access Editor that allows you to flip or invert your model without rotating it.