Animating the Transformation of Object Centers

Although you can transform an object's center in Center mode (see Center Manipulation [Working in 3D Space]), you cannot directly animate its transformation. You would want to animate an object's center to, for example, make an object rotate from a given pivot and then have the pivot change to somewhere else relative to the geometry.

You can do this in Softimage by animating the object pivot as described in Working with Object Pivots [Working in 3D Space].

Another way is to constrain the object's center to a null using a Pose constraint (or make it a child of the null), then animate the null's transformations. The Pose constraint constrains the scaling, rotation, and translation values all together. For more information, see Pose Constraints.

You can also constrain the object's center to two different nulls, animate the nulls, then blend the nulls' constraint weights to control how much the object is influenced by each null. As well, you can animate this weight blending. For more information, see Blending Constraints.