Hello-
I'm working on a simulation of a simple, old-fashioned pin ball game. The kind where a ball drops into the top, bounces off of pins, and is caught in the bottom in a v-shaped bumper.

The game consists of the game “board,” with objects on it: a ball, pins and bumpers. I want the ball, pins and bumpers to be separate objects, and yet retain their relative position if the board is moved or tilted. So the frame of reference is the board.

I was having some success in laying this out, but I am experiencing some distortions in the bumpers. An example bumper would be a box which I am re-sizing at the object level.

The bumper is constrained to resting precisely on the board, but you can position the bumper anywhere you want on the board. I.e, you can set the x/z-position, but the y-position is constant.

I have experimented with setting the x/z-position by typing in values at the object level. The values are added to the relative references to the board. This is kind of cumbersome, so I tried setting up an edit node at the geometry level.

Then I noticed that the handles looked distorted. I guess it has something to do with the frame of reference of the board?

I experienced a similar distortion when using an edit node to modify the rotation of the bumper. Worse, really, because the bumper itself looked like it was getting skewed. I was wondering if anyone cared to comment.
-Scott

never scale non-uniformly at the Object level.
if you're ‘shaping’ geometry you should do this in SOPs.

Ah, OK; I'll do my shaping (scaling) of geometry at the geometry level. Thanks.