Software Discussion

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BColbourn
2,323 posts

14 Feb 2008
We learned expressions yesterday in lecture(SDK, expression editor, and connection editor) and I took it upon myself to see if I could run a series of gears through expressions and thankfully this morning during lab I got a chance to try it and was very successful.

the setup I was trying to recreate was this:

my animation:

http://www.bencolbourn.com/animation/gears.avi

and here's the maya file(note: the center gear is the driver for the others)
http://www.bencolbourn.com/gears.mb
Claymation
600 posts

14 Feb 2008
Hey that's pretty nifty! SDK are my best friend.

Personally I've been trying to stay away from expressions lately, and use SDK or utility nodes whenever possible. Expressions are a lot slower.
BColbourn
2,323 posts

14 Feb 2008
i'm still yet to successfully use an SDK, could you point me in the direction of a tutorial?
Claymation
600 posts

14 Feb 2008
After a quick look on 3dtotal I found this:

http://www.3dtotal.com/team/Tutorials/h ... ler_01.asp
BColbourn
2,323 posts

03 Mar 2008
many thanks for the tut link. I've practiced SDK's a few times now in lab and I think I have the hang of them. I've also been reading up on expressions more indepth too. i didnt know you could do conditional statements with expressions(such as: if objectY is within 20 units of objectX then object Y must travel in X axis * -1, or whatever.