Useful Mover setting

[Shuriken_Star]

Not exactly a tutorial but, since I see too many people ignoring one simple setting on the movers & making it harder for themselves for certain creations, I'll just post it here.



The number 1 imitation of a mover, that I've seen, would be the tag follower, which follows a tag on the same object/vehicle the follower is on. To be honest, I too have made this mistake, but quite a while ago I noticed one simple setting on a regular mover or advanced mover: the LOCAL setting (looks like a gear with an arrow going around it). I first thought that other people would notice it too, but not very many did. MM should've named this setting something else a little more obvious, like "rotate" or something, but this setting allows the directions of the mover to rotate WITH the object/vehicle it's mounted on. This setting immediately makes the tag/follower combination completely redundant. So I now hope people will realize the importance of this single setting and not continue to ignore it.

Also, one thing this setting allows, that a tag/follower combo cannot, is allow variable movement in both axis of movement (up-left, down-right, etc...) and still maintain a constant speed.

[ATMLVE]

That sounds very useful but... Im not quite sure what exactly you mean, could you be more specific?

[Shuriken_Star]

Ok, say you mount a controlinator on a block of material, doesn't really matter what kind except dark matter. You then wire up an advanced mover and a rotator. Normally, you should mover right, left, up, or down in reference to the camera, regardless of how you tilt the block of material. If you set the advanced mover to "local", it would move the block in reference to its tilt, so if you tilt 45 degrees to the right, you will move a tilted 45 degrees of what you input, such as if you go right you will go down-right, instead of just right.

[Epicurean Dreamer]

"Local Space" refers to the directional movement becoming "local" to the relative orientation of the object. Non local is "absolute" directional movement. Down is always down. With local space (MM didn't fudge the name, it's actually very accurate to the function of this option), If the object was upside down, down would now be up. If the object was turned right 90 degrees, down would now be left.

For example if you placed a look at rotator on an object set to look at a tag on another object, an advanced mover with a + input to the up/down input and set the local space on the advanced mover to ON. The object would 'always' head directly towards the tag. As the object turns to face the tag, 'up' would 'locally' become whatever orientation was towards the tag. If the tag was then to move about, the look at rotator would rotate in keeping with them movement of the tag and its trajectory would alter accordingly, because locally its 'up' would be altering as the object rotated, following the tag.

[merkaba48]

To further clarify and simplify: If local space is turned on, then 'up' is the mover gadgets 'up' and not the level's 'up'.

[Shuriken_Star]

Yeah, I'm not that good at putting words together, but that's a much better explanation. Even though MM named it "local", a good number of people still don't know about it, so I'm just trying to let people know what it does.

[Krondelo]

Yes, it refers to the local space. Thats why when you put it on a camera it turns with the LOCAL object its on.

No offense to people but if they can't find an option and tinker with things they need to try a little harder.

[Sack-Jake]

I know this function exists and what it does, but I never know what it should be used for? I've never really found any good uses for the local space option besides in movie cameras.

[Chazprime]

Here's a way to visualize it:

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5020/5483998461_7223fc1969.jpg

The first image is a cube with no rotation. The arrows represent how the object will move. The second image show world space translation after the cube is rotated, the third image shows local space translation.