LDCad 1.4 Beta 2 (win+linux)

[Roland Melkert]

Tried again to understand a tiny bit more the animations... and failed miserably.
I tried to animate the attached model using groups, but top rotor doesn't rotate correctly (it starts rotated 90°). Suspecting (wrongly) it might be an interaction with submodels, I flattened the model... to get a result even worse. Looking at the propriety of the groups, I guess I understand what happens: their default orientation is not identity, so the setOri wipes out their initial rotation. I guess I could solve this with a matrix multiplication, but it's much more complicated than I expected...

Yes the setOri call is absolute and thus will only act as expected on groups/references using an identity matrix. To compensate for this you need to buffer the original orientation in the onStart function, like so:

Code:

function onStart()
  --grp ori bug prevention
  topRotorBaseOri=ldc.subfile():getGroup('TopRotor'):getOri()  
end

And then apply it on a per frame like so:

Code:

local ax2=mainSf:getGroup('TopRotor')
  ori:setRotate(-angle, 0, 1, 0)
  ori:mulBA(topRotorBaseOri)
  ax2:setOri(ori)

Note: I've flipped the sign of angle to make it spin the right way.

You could also buffer the group references in the start event, but this being a very small script it won't matter much speed wise.

Otherwise, I tried also something else: animate flexible parts. I hoped that if I included a flex part path point to a group, this path point would be animated too with the group... doesn't work!

Not yet indeed, I need to make some adjustments path/spring generation stuff in order to make that useful (fast enough etc). This is something I hope to do for 1.6 as part of the animation/script improvements.