question about property transfer
#1
hey, 
while working on a setup with motion along splines i encountered the "constant velocity" issue with path follow operator.
now in this scene i try to workaround it using 3dmax path constraint and constant velocity checkbox.
thats working fine so im trying to store these clean values with custom properties so i can spawn several instances/groups along these splines.
in the event "importPositions" i use custom properties set to continous and store the full TM.
now in the event "main" im trying to GET said TM for each individual particle but i can only get it to work for the first particle. 
i tried to filter the GET operator by birthID but its not working ((

how do i set this up correct to get the TM values for each (3 in this example) particle respectively? 

thanks in advance!


Attached Files
.max   constantVel_00_03.max (Size: 712 KB / Downloads: 122)
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#2
What's the constant velocity issue?

As for your scene, you don't need custom properties...just use the Set Target operator in birth ID offset mode and then move/link within the Set Target settings.

Note that I changed the event evaluation order as well so the path particles spawn first.


Attached Files
.max   constantVel_00_04.max (Size: 688 KB / Downloads: 116)
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#3
the velocity issue i encountered is that if i use path follow operator, the velocity/motion was not linear along the length of the spline. 
see in the scene attached; at some point happens a strong slow and then it suddenly accel. again. 
also, i copied the same spline 5 times and the path follow has no variation. yet somehow they are a bit offset.  

the set target looks good buuut i didnt paint the whole picture)
now looking at my goal again, i think if i you could point me towards solving the path follow issue i wouldnt need custom prop. nor set target. 

also, im again on an older version because of render farm (1.011); could it be that something about path follow got fixed recently?
sorry if thats the issue again, im always a bit behind on the version  Rolleyes

thanks!


Attached Files
.max   pathFollowIssue_01.max (Size: 664 KB / Downloads: 117)
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#4
soo, consider this solved.
i dont know whats wrong with the splines in this test scene i posted; but when i got the splines for the production from 2D artists (from illustrator) and tried it again with path follow - it suddenly works fine...

one follow up question would be about the spline interp. setting in path follow operator:
does the interp. count relate to the spline object or all splines (elements) inside one (edit) spline object?
like; if i have 10 splines in 1 spline object and 1000 interpolation: does each spline get 1000 points or do the 10 splines share the 1000 points?
thanksss
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#5
Oh sorry, I forgot to check back into this thread and look at your file. Glad it's solved!

As for the interpolation setting, that's per-subspline. So if your spline object has 3 subsplines and you set the interpolation setting to 1000, there will be 3000 total resolution points generated.

You can generally keep that value pretty high, regardless. The math involved to do the nearest point searches is pretty quick.
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