Maya: Freezing Transforms on an Annotation

Coding
1

I’m working on creating a custom locator, and I’d like to use annotations. I haven’t used them in the past, so I’m getting hung up on a a little detail.

I attached an annotator to my locator and positioned it where it’s most readable. Ideally, the annotationShape would be parented to the locator, in the name of cleanliness. I do this a lot with curveShapes. The problem I’m having is it seems impossible to Freeze Transformations on an Annotation node. This is a problem because when I parent the annotationShape node to the locator, of course it snaps to the center of the locator.

Does anyone know of a work around? My goal is to have the annotationShape offset without having to have a annotation child node under the locator.

Locator and the annotation node with desired offset

1017×433 93.4 KB

Can’t Freeze Transformations so when the shape is parented, the offset disappears.

2

Just out of curiosity is the preserve position option checked in your parent options:


I tried it on my side with the options above and the annotation stayed in the right spot (assuming I correctly understand what you are doing)

-chris

3

Thanks for the reply, Chris.

I’m attempting to keep the offset when I parent the annotation shape to the locator, not the annotation node itself. Because I can’t freeze the transforms on the annotation node, when I parent the shape to the locator with parent -s -r, the shape gets snapped to the origin.

4

Just to update, I moved away from trying to get the annotation to work the way I want and instead looked into creating a custom node via plugin.

Within a custom shape’s draw() function, I just use view.drawText(), where I can directly control the position of the text.