Hi All,

Here's a problem i'm now having: I select an object in the viewport, and i click the move tool, and the object won't move! I even enter different values in the “translate” fields the object stays put. Other objects in the scene will move but certain ones won't.

The one's that won't move all have something in common. They are extracted objects. I had a car geometry that was only a few object nodes. I selected each piece of the car, and extracted it to a new object node. now when i try to parent those extracted car parts to something, they don't move. even if i don't parent them, they still don't want to move. but the original node that the parts were extracted from is fine, it moves around.

How do i fix this?

Also, at other times, i've noticed that when i try to use the move tool by grabbing the blue or green handle, it turns pink and won't let me do any moving. how also do i fix that? Thanks in advance for letting me know!

I've solved the problem by deleting the .hipnc file I was working with, ahhh, what a relief!

It seems that while i was scaling and clearing the transforms of the geometries, i screwed things up such that if i attempted to move something even a tiny bit, the translate field would say something like 3999874.4e

and when something is “e”, like when you do too many calculations on a calculator and it tells you “e”, that's it. its time to hit clear and start over.

I've taken a less gung ho approach to scaling and things seem to have worked out. Just thought i'd let whoever is having similar problems know!

fai
The one's that won't move all have something in common. They are extracted objects. I had a car geometry that was only a few object nodes. I selected each piece of the car, and extracted it to a new object node. now when i try to parent those extracted car parts to something, they don't move. even if i don't parent them, they still don't want to move. but the original node that the parts were extracted from is fine, it moves around.

The extract tool works by grabbing the geometry with a object merge node. Now the object merge node is by default designed to lock down the transform of that shape and therefore ignore any transforms applied at the object level. There are two options -

First you can dive down the the geometry level and on the object merge node set transform to None - this will object merge the geometry but ignore transformations from the original object and will allow you to position the extracted object and it will update. The problem is that if your original object had been transformed then the extracted object will appear offset.

The second option is to go down to the geometry level and click on the lock flag on the object merge node. This will let you move the extract object at the object level but you will lose your connection to the original geometry - therefore if the original model is reshaped then that will not be picked up by the new one.

Thank you very much for those 2 options. I hadn't even considered that it would be possible for an extracted object to update!

I've locked the object merge nodes and it worked instantly! Now i can finally get a good night's sleep and this nightmare of unmoving objects can come to an end.

I'm looking forward to revisiting my .hipnc files of the past and applying this “tweak” to them to get them rolling again, thanks!!!

if you are going to be locking lots of sops be aware once locked the data is stored in the hip file and the file could get quite large. You might be better using the other option mentioned or writing out the extracted pieces to disk once and then reading them back in.