I gotta make a short sequence of an invisible violinist playing the violin. Now I could just do it easy and move the bow back and forth, but I’d like it to be more real and have the bow tilt as well. As its moved and tilted, essentially the pivot point changes all the time.

What should I look into?

Windows 7
Max 2010 SP1 32/64
Max 2012 32/64
Intel Quad-core
8Gb ram

Look into the LinkedXForm modifier. Add that to your bow and use a dummy (XForm) for your control object. That will control the movement back and forth in local space. Create another dummy (Master), put it at the pivot of the bow and link the XForm dummy to the Master dummy. The master will control the rotation of the bow and the overall position.

You might want to look into using a Rotation List controller for the master dummy rotation too. Then you can animate the rotation in local space instead of world space.

3ds Max 2009 SP1, 2010 SP1
Maya 2012
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Dual Intel Xeon E5520, 6 GB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 OC

Gee, every millimeter of bow can potentially be a pivot point for string crossings, this would be a tricky animation in terms of getting it realistically smooth.

I saw a tutorial recently (can’t find it) that used CAT’s CATHDPivotTrans for animated pivots. I don’t have time to look now, but a quick google search found this: http://www.3dworldmag.com/2011/0...otating-pivot-in-3ds-max/ which could be a starting place for researching animated pivots using CAT. When I saw the tutorial, I remember it seemed to work so well, compared to linking-to-dummy way.

Edit: I think this is the video I saw: http://www.cgtraining.com/CAT/CATpivot.html

3ds Max 2013, Windows 7 pro 64bit.
MSI NVidia GeForce GT240, 1GB DDR3 (Driver 286.19).
i7 2.93Ghz , 16Gb CORSAIR Vengeance RAM, DX9.0c.

I have a solution for you...let me try it and I will post up what I can.
Edit...Here you go, in Max 2012
Move pointcontrol001 in the y and z plane or even x all you want...it stays on the strings.
If you wish the bow to move from string to string as it would when you tilt and play you would need to move the other point to that string.
EDIT2: added a bad path to go with the bad violin.

3ds Max 9 thru 2013
Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit OS SP1
Dual Intel® Xeon® 6 core X5650 @ 2.67GHz CPU 36GB RAM
NVIDIA Quadro 4000
450GB HDD (x3) and 2TB HDD

3ds Max 2012 Certified Professional Models to Motion

	Attachment
badviolin_1.zip