Positioning

[pixel_legolas]

I really hate the way we need to manually position things like muzzleflash or as in my case, a sword to hand.

When i have loaded a sword to a model i need to position it, but its not possible to do it with dragging, i have to go to the script, look for x , y , z and then manually apply a number, the problem is that if i go for 0, 0 , 1 the small number one can make it fly away far in one direction almost. Sometimes just raising one number makes it go diagonally towards hand or off from it.

There should be a more visual method for applying these things, if not using "attach to invisible thingy" thing

[Squat]

I agree, that placing things by way of trying to figure out an X,Y,Z based on an existing X,Y,Z is one hell of a royal pain in the ass. But, it's been that way since I can remember.

What I'd like to see is a way to combine objects into an OPR that takes the difference between the object's positions in world space and gives you a reading that's similar to how you can align things in Max, by associating a different local coordinate system (based on any object you pick...becomes the temporary world's 0,0,0.)

One trick I've used often is to manually move the object I'm trying to add to the world 0,0,0.

Say you have a house model and you want to add all the doors. The house isn't at world 0,0,0...rather it's at 38.374,-42.0345, 6.6539. Right? the doors are at random ass coordinates. WAY too random to try and figure anything out. So there's no way to add them to the .OPR for the house without taking both x1 and x2 and y1 and y2...etc. If you do a "combine objects" or something like that, it could do that operation for us. That way, you can position something manually (using a dummy object) and then add it to an existing .OPR and the function realigns the position so that it's relative to the objects. Would work Gekido and be VERY USEFUL.

The main thing I'm needing it for is that I have to build my collisions out of boxes because some objects have areas at an angle and the physics editor's way of placing and sizing things is almost as painful and doesn't even have the ability to rotate them. I'd like to select one box and add all the others that are related to that object so I get one large .OPR with all elements inside of it.

It could also be argued we need an "explode" function to pull them back apart and reassociate the world 0,0,0.

However, there IS the notion that you can attach things exactly where you want on your own custom models as long as you take a second to add and parent a null pointer in your export scene. Now you can attach to that and keep 0,0,0 and H,S,B at 0,0,0 because it's exactly whre the null object is (which would normally follow an animation). Of course, this is the NULL object IN your app, not the one you can add in GC, which requires you to type in coordinates.