Plan for Jeff Gran

Yeah, I figured out how to use Blender's Object ScriptLinks to define custom controllers for objects. It's actually extremely powerful. Anything you can express in code you can use to control your objects.

I was annoyed by the fact that (a) there's no parent constraint or position/rotation constraint with offsets, and (b) You currently can't create constraints from script. But now I can have an object be the "parent" of another object, with my own custom and dynamic offset values, all without actually affecting the hierarchy - both objects are still at the scene root. I'm sure it doesn't sound that exciting to most, but I'm jazzed that I figured it out and it opens up a lot of possibilities with my python scripting that I thought were dead ends. So, progress on TorqueSkel Blender continues.

Here's the code for the hell of it - pretty simple really (now that it's here in front of me :))

import Blender
##########################
parent =  Blender.Object.Get("Sphere")
###################################


obj = Blender.link

obj.addProperty("offsetX", (obj.LocX - parent.LocX), "FLOAT")
obj.addProperty("offsetY", (obj.LocY - parent.LocY), "FLOAT")
obj.addProperty("offsetZ", (obj.LocZ - parent.LocZ), "FLOAT")

LV=Blender.Mathutils.Vector([obj.getProperty("offsetX").getData(),obj.getProperty("offsetY").getData(),obj.getProperty("offsetZ").getData()])

PM = parent.getMatrix()
PM = PM.rotationPart()

newX = (LV.x * PM[0][0]) + (LV.y * PM[1][0]) + (LV.z * PM[2][0])
newY = (LV.x * PM[0][1]) + (LV.y * PM[1][1]) + (LV.z * PM[2][1])
newZ = (LV.x * PM[0][2]) + (LV.y * PM[1][2]) + (LV.z * PM[2][2])

obj.loc = [parent.LocX + newX, parent.LocY + newY, parent.LocZ + newZ]
obj.rot = parent.rot

Oh, and I also have a super-spiffy addition to TorqueSkel MAX almost finished... but I'll wait 'till it's done and tested to unveil it.