Roman is right, just parenting down the chain, with small sphere (proxy geometry) to change the pivot control, from the center to one end.

where separators come into play is to branch off arms and legs from the main body. The body's transform will still control the arm, but sibling hierarchies wont affect each other. That way you can move the body of the character and the arms don't fall off, but if you rotate the left shoulder it wont affect the right shoulder or legs.

Thats how I created the dancing man patch, from a wow (World of War-craft) character that my friend build. Its still somewhat crude, but fun to be able to control characters in real-time during your performance.

On 4/17/07, Kyle Klipowicz <kyleklip@gmail.com> wrote:
Ok, yes. After tinkering last night a bit I found that it is indeed
this simple. For some reason I was getting confused, based upon where
I was putting the separators for different branches of the structure.
I like this top-down approach. It makes it easy to add global
modifiers at the top of the gem chain.

~Kyle

On 4/17/07, Roman Haefeli <reduzierer@yahoo.de> wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-04-16 at 23:32 -0500, Kyle Klipowicz wrote:
> > Ok, that was a dumb question, after looking at separator.
> >
> > But it raises some questions for me: is the best way to position
> > multi-geo unit, say of a sphere being orbited by smaller spheres, best
> > accomplished by using a lot of additions, or is there a way to chain
> > translate objects?
>
> if i understand you correctly, this is _very_ simple to achieve. here an
> example of a renderchain:
>
>
> [gemhead]
> |
> [translateXYZ]         <- translate the whole planet system around
> |
> [sphere 1]             <- sun
> |
> [rotateXYZ]            <- rotate around  Y-axis
> |
> [translateXYZ 2 0 0 ]
> |
> [sphere 0.1]            <- earth
>
>
> you can also add the moon:
>
> |
> [rotateXYZ]        <- rotate around Y-axis
> |
> [translate 0.2]
> |
> [sphere 0.03]
>
>
> hope, that makes it clear how to 'resolve dependencies' in gem.
>
> roman
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>


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