Maya: Freezing Transforms on an Annotation

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

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

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

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.

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.