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RudySchneider:
Owl ---
Just an observation...

Any time you model something you intend to animate rotationally, make certain that you center each object at its individual center of rotation.  Offsetting it from zero makes it much more difficult to manage once you try to combine it with another object.

Think in terms of an airplane, with pitch, yaw, and roll orientations.  The plane (normally) rotates about its center of gravity, not its nose, tail, or wings. 

Owl:
Thanks Rudy - you were a big help and my presentation was very successful.

For others, the approach Rudy taught me was in OBJECT, create one object, called say "composite object" that contains all the elements. That way you can get all the elements in proper registrations. Then for each moving part create a new object and populate it with copy/paste from the elements of the "composite object" This creates the proper parent/child relationship.

RudySchneider:
Mmmmm, not exactly, Owl.  But the important thing is that you achieved the results you were after, which is really all that matters!


OK, so let me expound just a bit on a generic approach to modeling, rendering, and animation, at least from my perspective.

It's important to "think ahead" about what it is you're trying to do.  A top-level, "composite object" model can be good for gathering ideas, but it doesn't provide the necessary flexibility when you want to modify one or more elements.  It's often better to treat your model like you would a model car or airplane --- as a bunch of individual piece parts that come together.  And of course, the approach you take to modeling also depends on whether you want something simple to convey an idea or something that looks convincing.

Creating a stick, box, or blob figure is relatively quick and easy to model and animate, and can be quite useful at conveying ideas and, because of how the brain "fills in" details, even emotions.

On the other hand, if you're modeling something organic, such as a face or a human body, in order to appear convincing, you need to mimic what a real face/body does: moving one portion of the mesh can affect another portion.  For instance, when you smile, it's not just your mouth that moves; your cheeks plump up, your ears move, creases appear below your eyes, wrinkles appear, your lips may part, revealing teeth.  These are not independent actions, but with careful modeling and --- in this case --- bone setup, you can control each action independently.

For non-organic models, such as your quad, it's best to keep the parts that move separate and independent from the parts that don't move, and then "build" the model and establish the parent-child relationships within your scene.  And, obviously, it's important to understand the relation between the parts that move and those that don't.  For instance, the props rotate and provide the lifting force to move the frame in real life, but they are fixed in place on the frame.  So in your animation scene, the frame is the parent of the prop, not the other way around.  And as I've said in a previous post, bones are great for organic models, but aren't necessary for "hard" objects.  X-Y-Z translations and Roll-Yaw-Pitch orientation should be adequate within the scene.

Likewise, the cage may rotate, but it is attached to the frame.  So, the frame is also the parent of the cage.  That is, you want the cage to follow the azimuth (right-left) motion of frame, but you want the cage to rotate in pitch and be independent from and have no effect on the frame pitch motion.

With more time and experience with Anim8or (or any other modeling package) these things have a way of becoming more apparent.  My basic recommendation to folks just starting out is to model fixed and movable piece parts as individual objects, and then "build" them in the scene.  I already said that though, didn't I.

Oh, and one final observation.  For any object that translates or rotates, make certain that, in Object Mode, you locate the rotational axis (axes) at the origin.  Otherwise, you're liable to get some weird motion in your scene that you will end up fighting.

Good luck and good Anim8ing...

Trevor:
Id like to add that by Object here I am pretty sure he means Objects held in the object menu and not seperate 'Meshes' Within an object.
Sometimes it can be confusing and a mesh can quite correctly be concieved as a seperate object, but in the terms of this modeling it is not.

I have of course just realised what is going on here and infact have already done this approach with guns in GoldenEye.

Trev

ENSONIQ5:
RudySchneider is spot on, great bit of "Anim8or 101" there.  Interestingly, for complicated mechanical things like steam engines I do tend to do what Owl suggested, creating a single composite Object that contains all the meshes.  This allows me to make sure all the parts are modeled correctly and fit together properly.  Once I'm happy with it each moving part is cut and pasted into a new Object and correctly centred, with the original Object (now missing the bits that move) becoming the base parent Element in the scene.  As all the Objects are introduced into the Scene as Elements and given the correct parent/child relationship I can be confident that they will fit together perfectly as they did in the original composite Object.

To each their own.  Anim8or allows for many different approaches to animation within in its (brilliant) Object/Figure/Sequence/Scene architecture.

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