shape parenting

[jbills]

not sure if someone has suggested it yet - surely - but it would be nice to have a shape parenting feature of some kind.

I'm just not quite sure how this might be implemented?

In most other programs, the groundwork is laid to have axis or transform keyframes seperate from shape keyframes. Currently the two are joined in s+r. So, I'm not sure how parenting might work.

If the separation exists, then you just parent the "axis" of a shape to another shape and you're done. But it's hard to parent shape keyframes to another shape, as points move differently. I guess you might be able to parent the center of the shape or something?

Really, I think it might be good to break out axis (and I say axis meaning position, scale, rotation - axis is a term that comes from discreet products - sorry) and shape keyframes seperately to provide this sort of functionality. This would allow some powerful tracker interaction as well, as you could use trackers to move shapes but not set shape keyframes. Shake has it so you can bake trackers into the shape keys, which is nice - but I'm not sure this would be necessary if everything was seperate. Baking is really a workaround because things behave unpredictably at times in shake and sometimes the only solution is to bake the movement in because something's whacked with their parenting code and how it interacts with rotoshapes.

What also might be good is if you could somehow parent a shape to another but limit the parenting to a certain timeframe. So say I had a goose feather that I wanted to parent to an existing hat spline, but only for so long. It *might* be cumbersome to have to duplicate a spline to break that parented relationship. Might be nice to be able to define a time range for the parenting relationship. I'm not sure - would have to work with it both ways and see what is easier.

But would love to see something like this in the future? Just throwing it out, maybe others can chip in some features along this line of thinking - haven't thought it through much.

Thanks!

[perryk]

Parenting and other hierarchy operations are planned.

[jbills]

Ya, after a day pretty much full of tracking, I'd like to toss out a request to bake tracking info into shapes - or adding that full blown parenting I was talking about. I know, I know, it's planned. Sorry, just writing it up.

My shot today had 300 frames, with different camera moves on the 1st half vs. the 2nd half.

So, what I did was track the first half to get the first camera move, then fired up a 2nd tracker on the second half.

Stabilized the plate with tracker #1. Did the roto on first half. worked fine.

Now, starting 2nd half. Would like to apply tracker #2 to my new set of splines that are going to roto the 2nd half of the shot (element got obscured and I can literally start this half with a new set of splines).

Can't do that - there's no way to bake the tracker data from tracker #1 into these existing splines so that I can un-apply the stabilizer and move on with applying the next tracker to new splines. I guess this falls under my parenting request.

Not sure the best way to go about stabilizing with multiple trackers. I think baking the movement in is really the only way? But without this functionality the stabilizing function is fairly limited. Rarely except for bumpy lock offs is one tracker going to do the job.

Of course, as always I could be completely missing something and if there's a way to do this now, please let me know!

[mikeparsons2]

I totally agree, what could also be handy is the ability to easily cut and paste tracker data between tracks, also some basic add/subtract/average type track data combining.