Help with 3DS and aligning pivots to edges.

[TheJamsh]

This is doing my head in, I'm trying to align a pivot, or ANYTHING, to this edge, but as you can see the edges axis don't line up with it.

I need to somehow put a pivot point in the center of this edge, and make sure that one of the axis lines up with it. Anybody know how to do this?

[MrTwosheds]

A pivot, is the point in a mesh who's value is 0,0,0. Edges don't have pivots, its a line between 2 points, that's just a Max gizmo...
I assume your trying to vert-animate the ends of those flange bits, to open, flower like.
Only need 1 bone per flange really, just make sure the verts on that red edge are not effected, deselected by the bones envelope, so they don't move, then you just have to figure out how much to move each bone in each direction, to make the 4 verts on the flange move the right way.
Don't forget that bz2 cannot do scale animations but you can simulate them with position anims. Its much like what your trying to do here.

[Apollo]

Set your snaps toggle to 3 and Midpoint.

[TheJamsh]

Set your snaps toggle to 3 and Midpoint.

Thanks, I'll try that next time.

I eventually managed to do it another way, which actually made things a LOT easier and resulted in a better animation, but it required having two bones per flap, using an IK solver for each flap and making them the child of a dummy cube. Once the cube was animated (which controlled the rotation of the bones in relation to the centre of the engine, regardless of their pivot point), I then baked that animation down into the bones. Dead simple really, and it means I only have to move one object to animate all five flaps per engine.

Only thing I WISH I'd realised before, is that you CANNOT clone bones, then give them a negative scale to mirror them. It gives you all sorts of screwy results down the line. The 'Bone Tools' dialog has a 'Mirror Bones' function, so make sure to use that if you want to copy-paste bones from one side of a model to the other.