Hello people, I could use a little help on this one...

Im working on a grouped object that Im trying to set for jointing/rigging/poseability Carrara style and am having trouble setting the exact location of my hot points...

Truth be known, Im working on a door hinge. Its a grouped object, and I need it to "bend" at the pin. My problem is trying to get the hinge to bend at center pin, so I need the doorframe side and door side hinge to have the same hot point as the pin. When I try to exact the location of the hot point of the hinges, it refuses to be at the same space as the pin, and Im entering the locations numerically, copying the position of the pin to the position of the hinges.

The hot point of the hinge wont go exactly where the hot point of the pin is, and the offset makes for poor repositioning/bending/rotating of the door hinge as a whole...

Any ideas or ways I can set them to take up the eaxct same location?!?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

I remember having a similar question in regards to constraints for rotation. And I just managed to find Mark's answer. (Setting constraints into the needed position can be really tricky otherwise.) The problem is, that when leaving the modeling room, your model will be re-orientated from its initial position in the assembly room. So you'll have to re-tweak things yet again. (Now if you made the model in Carrara, you can probably disregard this since it should be lined up.)

If your origin axes are already lined up, but not quite centered, you might find Sparrowhawke 3D's Transforms Package plugin to be of some use. It's very nice considering the price!

This tool sounds like the perfect thing, thanks for the heads up =)

I tried it, Im not sure if it works w/ the latest 7.1, or maybe I did something wrong when installing...

I installed all files (both the transforms package and the sdk?!?) to my extensions folder and am thinking I may need to make a seperate folder w/i the extensions folder to unzip all the files too?!? My initial test of it I received an error =(

Never used any Plugins for Carrara, I must really be missing out...

Gonna have to hunt for more =)

Again, thanks for pointing me in that direction.

I don't know if it's a versioning problem. Most of his stuff seems to be made for 5 or 6. (I'm using an older version myself, so I haven't run into any problems.) One would expect some degree of backwards-compatability, but that's not always the case.

BTW Sparrowhawke3d has an account here at Renderosity, so float him a message. He's fairly helpful and would have a better answer on problems with his plugins than I would.

Thanks for responding back, its greatly appreciated =D

I did indeed email the guy, but I think yahoo is on the rampage, and everything we send out gets spamboxed. Ill throw a rock his way here too =)