Awesome, thanks again for that and have a great Christmas and new years (if you dont hear from me again before!)

I ended up using edges for the project, I thought I tried every cobination of settings, but great to know it actually works in a cloner on polygons!

Shame there isnt just a simple constraint you can use for this kind of thing, makes it kinda complicated when doing a lot of objects.

Thanks again Dr Sassi!

I tried parenting it to an edge instead and it works fine. Looks like the normals in a cloth sim are fine on edges - weird that polygons get messed up though

Looks like the moving mesh (which was a cloth sim) is the problem - for some reason the normals flip randomly in the sim itself

here's just the original plane sim, you can see if you select any polygon that the normals freak out during the sim. https://we.tl/t-oyCm5fWeg2

Do you know if thats something that can be fixed? Or do polygon normals always go crazy in a cloth sim?

Cheers, basically Im trying to make a popup book - I want the page to turn (deform) and some paper objects pop up attached to the surface of the page.

Using the Cloner method almost works but as you can see in my project, it flips around strangley at the start

https://we.tl/t-0VUqoubtzG

I've baked the popup animation as keyframes, but the rotation seems to go crazy when it travels along with the mesh.

Any idea if there's a better way to stick objects to a page like this: https://youtu.be/1jxodEBzsRc

Cheers, I mean it needs to stick to the polygon and move along with it as the mesh moves and deforms, so it needs to be locked to the surface not just placed there

Hi again Dr Sassi,

Do you happen to know if its possible to parent a Null to the center of a polygon on a deforming mesh?

I can get it working with a Cloner or Matrix, but I was wondering if there was an easier way with Xpresso or Constraints.

I can constrain to Points with Xpresso and Constraints and to a polygon, but I cant get the Null to align to the polygon normal and have it stick while rotating.

Here's my test file, any ideas if its even possible? https://we.tl/t-5fPW19qO3C

Thanks again!

Awesome, thanks for that, worked like a charm! Been a while since Ive needed to rig something like this up, this work flow makes life much easier! Cheers!

Hi Dr Sassi,

I'm trying to rig the spine of a book to open using joints and weighting.

I've painted in some weights with the Weight Tool and intend to smooth it out. But there's a few weighted points I'd like to set back to 0 weighting as they poke out when adjusting the joints - but no matter what I do I just cant seem to remove the weighting with the weight brush.

I tried many different modes - I would think subtract mode, or setting absolute mode to 0 and painting would work but it doesnt seem to do anything on the points, sometimes it even adds to the weighting. I also thought holding CTRL and painting would work which is what Chat GPT recommended - but it doesnt work.

Do you know what the steps would be to remove the weghting on the wrong points by painting?

Here's my file so far: https://we.tl/t-6lejxCn0rX

Thanks again!

Yes you're right! Moving those broken keys seems to fix the problem. The bake must have messed up the keyframes - I just used a track modifier for the bounce originaly. Weird that it looks fine without the cloner.

you've done it again, thanks for that! Now I can finish this one off, cheers!