How to create a 'Master Mover' | Forum

How to create a 'Master Mover'?

Hi there.

When building a studio scene in Axy, there are multiple components that have to be positioned.
- A table which the Billboard sits behind.
- The Billboard itself.
- The Virtual Camera to roughly match the perspective of the real world camera
- A few subtle camera moves
- Some 'floating Content Window' (say... a wheather map or the like)

Now when you re-position the table you have to re-do all the positioning of all the other elements,
including re-doing all your subtle camera moves.

That's why I was thinking about building a 'Master Mover'.
Basically a Transform (which drives a couple of TransformConcats) which allows to take the entire lot described above and move it to a different position.

In terms of Camera and Billboard it seems to be sufficient to insert the TransformConcat in between the MixedCam_Unreal_A-B_Preview_3+3-Cam and the Unreal Scene like so:

However, when moving things along the Z Axis, a slight (and not really consistent) offset betwen around in the unreal scene and the Billboard occurs. Observe the point where the Billboard intersects with the table.

Starting position.

Moving the lot in X is no issue at all.

Movement in Z makes the Billboard slide through the table:

After a certain amount of sliding, the Billboard's position stays a the same offset, no matter how far we move further in Z:

Any idea what's going on here?

Cheers & all the best.

Eric.

EricWest

Correcting myself here...

The sliding occurs in *both* X and Z now....

EricWest

And apparently....the longer a post the faster it moves away from page 1... :-)

Eifert@Aximmetry

Hi Eric,

I strongly suggest against modifying the Cam Transform between the Unreal and the camera compound. Even if you figure out the problem here, in the long run, it can cause other problems when you want to make changes.

Instead, I would suggest you put everything under one static mesh actor in Unreal except the cameras and the table. And you move that parent static mesh (Cube4):

Moving the parent mesh will move everything under it with it. However, since you leave the table in the root, that will stay at the same position, just like the camera positions in Aximmetry. You are moving the world around the table, instead of moving the table.

Once you finished, you can move back everything under the static mesh (back to the root).
And you can do all of it in live sync mode and see how things change in Aximmetry. Or you can move it in Aximmetry by sending the transformation to Aximmetry: https://aximmetry.com/learn/tutorials/for-aximmetry-de-users/passing-transformation-from-the-unreal-scene/

By the way, you can easily reposition tracked cameras using the Scene control board panel:

But this will not apply to the virtual cameras.

Warmest regards,

EricWest

Hi @Eifert.

Thanks again for your information!

For various reasons our setup became a bit more complicated though, combining Unreal and Axy renderer as well as components from different sources. So having just the master transform in Unreal just won't cut the mustard.

Good news is that I figured out where to insert which magic and with a bit of shuffling the transform matrix back and forth we were able to build our custom solution.
And thanks to Axy's great custom compound philosophy it's almost foolproof to use and works like a charme!

Cheers & all the best.

Eric.

How to create a 'Master Mover'?

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