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‌Put It Where?

SynthEyes objects (such as trackers, cameras, and meshes) have various location information you may need to talk about. Create a tracker and try these:

tracker 1's position tracker 1's location

The position is its 3-D coordinates:, the vector 10, 20, 0. Its location is its 2-D coordinates on the image: the point 0.3, -0.2. You can use alternate forms to enter points or vectors, such as [1,2,3] or point(0.2 0.1), or look at individual values such as tracker 1's position's x component.

Exercise: Use a far tracker to position a distant light

You can also do arithmetic on points and vectors.

Exercise: make teapot 1 twice as far from the origin

Cameras, moving objects, lights, and meshes have both 3-D positions and orientations, together they are commonly called a transform. Transforms can be accessed and changed with Synthia.

teapot 1's transform

You can break a transform into its pieces: position vector , x coordinate

(or component), orientation, or roll angle, for example.

Tip: Transforms (and positions) are normally supplied using your scene's current axis setting, such as Y-Up. If you look at camera 1's transform's pan angle , you won't get what you might expect unless the coordinate setting is Z-Up. So don't overthink! Just say camera 1's pan angle etc, that always works.

You can do typical math operations on transforms too, if you're up for it, such as multiplying them, offsetting them, or inverting them.

Exercise: You made 10 teapots with Duplicate Mesh. Twist them 45 degrees.

Meshes and (non-motion-capture) trackers don't really have fully independent animated positions: their positions are a composite of their parent's position and their individual relative position. You can get or change this non-animated relative position or relative transform directly.

In most cases, a position or location is for the current frame . That might be the current frame in the SynthEyes user interface, the frame being worked on in for each frame, ... or you might also talk about tracker 10's location on frame 15.

You might be inclined to start working up something like

for each frame, make camera 1's transform camera 1's transform

...

But there is a better way to adjust the entire scene, the same way that you can use the "Whole" button on the 3-D panel to drag not only the camera, but the entire scene.

transform whole camera01 by the translation vector 10, 0, 30. transform whole camera 1 by rotation by 10 around z scale 2.0.

In the second example above, the scaling of the scene is increased by a factor of 2 as well.

Exercise: define a rule to easily translate the whole scene by a vector.

In another variation, you can reposition the scene so that a given transform becomes the origin/ground plane.

transform whole camera 1 and meshes to teapot 1's transform

Here and meshes indicates that the meshes should be moved also, ie "Whole Affects Meshes" is turned on; you can use and meshes with transform ... by as well. You can use scene instead of whole, such as transform scene , as well.

Exercise: check out the various forms of transform whole.

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