Show in Contents

Add to Favorites

Home: Autodesk Maya Online Help

 

Introduction

Lesson 2: Solving with survey data

Creating a Plane constraint

 

Learning Resources > Tutorials > Getting Started with Maya > Live > Lesson 2: Solving with survey data > 

Creating a Distance constraint

Live has a variety of survey constraints. As your first example, you will create a Distance survey constraint. The Distance constraint defines the distance between two tracked points. Based on that one distance, the solver can establish the distances between all the locators.

To create a Distance constraint

1. Open the Live scene you created in the previous lesson.
2. In the Solve control panel, click the Survey option to open the survey constraint settings.
3. Choose Distance from the Constraint Type menu.

   Now you’ll need to specify two points that you want to constrain to a distance.

4. To help select the points, open the Outliner ( Window > Outliner).
5. Select the following track points in the Outliner under clip1TrackedPointVisibilityGroup > clip1TrackedPointGroup:
   • fenceCorner
   • tileInFront
6. In the Solve Survey control panel, click Create.
7. Enter 2 in the Distance setting.

   With this constraint, Live will force the locators for fenceCorner and tileInFront to be 2 units apart. Live does not incorporate the constraint until you run the solver again and create a new solution. You will do this later in the lesson.

   This constraint is not based on a film set measurement; it is simply an estimate. Using estimates to control the space between locators is often useful, but be careful not to use too many estimates. Too many estimates can prevent the solver from finding a solution.