Issues with Pivot Nodes in 2.7

[f.reichl]

Hi all,

I am having trouble using Pivot Nodes, and I am not sure if this is a bug in the current version of the Engine, or if I missunderstood on how to use them - or both ;-)

I createa a new World in the Editor2, then created a new Pivot Node at (0, 0, 0) and dragged the existing material ball underneath it. Now I have two issues:

1) When I click "Edit Pivot" in the Parameters Window, nothing happens. I checked the same behavior in an old Engine / Editor Version (2.5 with the old Editor), and clicking the "Edit Pivot" button there behaves as expexted. In Editor2, the button does not appear to toggle correctly, and I do not see any display of the Pivot in the scene. I guess this is a bug in Editor2?

2) I am confused about the effect of the Pivot Node. When I want to use it to control the pivot of a rotation of the children underneath, I need to perform my rotation using the "Local Transform" of the Pivot, and the nodes beneath it still keep their old pivot when rotated - is that correct? So all animations etc I'd like to do using a Pivot Node need to manipulate the "Local Transform"?

- Florian

[sebastianbah]

Hi Florian,

1) I'm afraid that absence of an additional manipulators is a known issue, but currently we can't give any ETA for the fix.

2) It may be difficult to use node pivot without additional manipulators, but try to check the following:

Use Pivot * fields to set transformation of the pivot point for a group of children nodes. 
Use Local * fields to modify children nodes' transformation relative to this additional pivot point.

Thanks!

[f.reichl]

Thanks for the reply. I just realized another issue that makes me wonder if this is even feasible for us: It does not seem to be possible to animate the properties of PivotNodes through the tracker, is that correct?

[morbid]

Hello Florian,

Yes, NodePivot options can't be modified via Tracker.

May I ask you what's the purpose, what you're trying to do with pivot and tracker?

Thanks.

[f.reichl]

We are importing Animations from another proprietary software. The animations are quite simple (mostly rotations around a pivot) and work on pivot points defined in the node hierarchy. The pivot position is independent of the position of the actually animated transform node, so our approach was to use the pivot nodes to achieve the same behavior.

But if we can't animate the pivots like this, we'll probably need to insert additional Dummy-Nodes into the hierarchy to serve as the rotation pivot.

[morbid]

Florian,

I've got feedback from the team. We're preparing SDK 2.8 and adding these parameters to the Tracker will shift release date, what we can't afford right now. Can't promise, but there's a possibility of a minor release at the end of May. So we could add NodePivot to the Tracker after 2.8 version. 

Alternatively, as you already mentioned, you can use NodeDummies for transformation.

--
Vsevolod