I was playing around with transform controller scripts and noticed something I don’t quite understand. I took a teapot and a sphere and applied a transform controller script to the teapot that did the following:
TM = $Sphere01.transform
TM.row1 = normalize TM.row1
TM.row2 = normalize TM.row2
TM.row3 = normalize TM.row3
TM
I was expecting to have the teapot follow the sphere directly with position and rotation and ignore any scale changes that were made to the sphere. For the most part this is what occurred as long as the scale changes to the sphere were uniform or took place on a local axis. However, when the sphere was rotated then a non uniform scale was applied to the world coordinate system it affected the teapot. I realized this was because the axis were being skewed, or no longer were at right angles, but what I found odd was that the scale dialog box within the max UI still reported a scale on the teapot. After I removed the transform script, I reset the values in the dialog to 100% and the axis’ were no longer skewed. So I guess my question is what is the scale dialog box doing? It must be a combination of things but what is the math behind correcting a skewed transform?
Just curious. Thanks.