[ZM3] Can you move a vehicle origin in a fully rigged vehicle?

I have been planning a car conversion for quite a while now, so I renewed my ZM3 license last night for a 3 month period. To ease myself into the whole vehicle process, I thought I would attempt what I presumed would be a simple fix on another vehicle first.

I have a photo-mod that uses bone locations as focus points but when you have none selected, it uses the vehicle origin... which is usually the centre of the vehicle. However, one I found last night, had the origin set well below the bottom edge of the wheel, like this. Please note, I have pixelated the vehicle so as not to cause any problem with the mod author. I am trying to do this in a diplomatic way and the vehicle really isn't that relevant anyway.

I have marked where the origin is and where I want to move it to, with the arrow.

But this caused the camera to point at the ground, instead of the vehicle. My first instinct was to simply unlink the children from the skel parent, move the skel parent to the right place and then relink the children.

However, that resulted in this:

Which as you can see, is not quite right. I normally would just delete the vehicle and install another one when I find this kind of problem but as I am embarking on a conversion, I thought that the answer might come in useful if (or should I say when) I create things incorrectly in the vehicle I am converting.

Is this something that can be fixed, or is it a problem that would require the hierarchy to be rebuilt with the origin in the right place from the start?

Edit: I should add that when I put the cursor over the origin, it does appear to be at 0,0,0 so it is the rest of the model that is in the wrong place relative to the origin, not the origin that is in the wrong place.

PNWParksFan

You know you can move the axes of an object without moving the mesh, right?

@PNWParksFan No, I honestly didn't. My experience with ZM3 is limited to moving the neon dummies in a bus, that's it.

PNWParksFan

@LeeC2202 a lot of the tools have a little box in the corner of the button you can click for more options, like "move children", "move axes", etc.

@PNWParksFan I can't actually see any difference between any of the settings in the move options. No matter what they are on, everything moves the same... and it all seems to be the same type of wrong movement.

I mean, this image is of the front-view, with everything selected and if I move things left and right, there's a perspective shift on everything. (this is a different model btw, I am experimenting on a game model , just to make sure I am working with something that should be built correctly).

The whole point of the Front, Left, Top etc... viewpoprts, is there is supposed to be no perspective, so I don't understand this relative shift. $:\$

But the other problem is that I have no idea whether any of those settings require you to be in a specific mode, with a specific button pressed, with things highlighted in a specific colour.

I could look in the documentation... if there was some. I just hate having to ask noob questions, because nobody wants to answer the same questions over and over again... and we shouldn't have to with commercial software, the reference should be there for us to read.

I'm going to leave it for tonight though, otherwise after just 24 hours, I'll be ready to abandon my conversion again

PNWParksFan

You appear to have everything selected. You need to select just the parent node, and uncheck "children" and "geometry" so it only has axes checked.

FoxtrotDelta

@LeeC2202 Sorry i just saw your thread. tag me next time you are doing it all wrong.

don't import this way. when you import a car, please make sure. "Slice to parts" option is Ticked (checked) before you hit import on yft. that way you can move axis without moving the car parts.

AHK1221

@LeeC2202 Well...... like @FoxtrotDelta said you are doing the importing part wrong. And to answer your question about moving the car origin, you really cant because then the wheels are messed up.

Okay... thanks for the replies everyone and sorry for my post being a rant. As many of you know, I really don't like ZM3, so I get frustrated very, very quickly.

@PNWParksFan Yeah, I had selected everything as part of trying to understand how things moved. I couldn't understand this lateral variation in how things were moving. My mind said "If you select everything and move it all, they should stay in the same relative position to each other" and they weren't doing that and I couldn't understand why.

@FoxtrotDelta You know me, I don't like random tagging people... I feel it's a bit intrusive, so I avoid it unless absolutely critical. This was just a "would be nice to fix" so it wasn't a major problem.

@AHK1221 The problem with doing something new, is you tend to do things wrong... especially when there's very little information about what is right. And if what you say is correct, then I am fighting a losing battle anyway. So I am probably better just leaving this one alone, uninstalling the addon and finding something without the problem.

And in the meantime, continue watching the tutorial videos and focus more on the actual conversion process from a clean model.

FoxtrotDelta

@LeeC2202 you thought right. if everything is selected everything should move relatively, its just that you imorted the model without slicded up settings. so axis are like glued to same cordinatedd and everything becomes a mess if you move axis or anything.

edit: this non sliced view is used to color vertices. and weld option to have cool effects like moving antenna and tank tracks. that adapt to the terrain.