Using the reactor tool for animation

Within my animation I wanted to make a cannonball smash through a castle wall. To do this I would need to use the reactor tool.

The first thing I needed to do was to take away part of the castle wall in the original model and replace it with a wall made from individual bricks. I used the array tool to do this quickly. I then added the top wall bricks and made it blend in with the rest of the model using the move and enlargement tools.

I then created the cannon ball using a sphere and added the relevant materials to make it look like a cannon ball.

Then selecting the newly made bricks, the cannon ball and the plane I made a rigid body collection.

The next stage was to create mass for the wall and the ball. I gave the ball a mass of 500 and the bricks 100. This would give a relatively realistic motion. I made the ball move by using the auto key and gave it a little rotation.

I adjusted the collateral tolerance to 0.4 to stop any bricks jumping high when the animation began.

I previewed the animation and was not happy about how the wall fell down so I adjusted the speed of the ball and the height of the impact. This made it much better.

I then created the animation and it iput it with the rest of the scene. I played it to make sure it worked fine and it did thank goodness!

With the scenes animation complete all I had left to do was to add lighting and a camera view as this would make it more interesting. I used a free direct light and added shadows. I moved and rotated its postion to gain the best looking angle I could find.

Next I used a free camera and animated its movements by using the autokey. I moved it from one side of the wall to the other attempting to capture the motion of the cannonball itself. But the camera moved way to fast so I changed the wideness of the lense so it was a more open perspective. This was the final result:

I really like the way it has turned out as it gives a high quality looking finish to the animation. I think the camera movement adds a lot to make it more interesting.

Reactor tool bowling

The next step of using the reactor tool I used an already created model of a bowling alley. Firstly I added all components into a rigid body collection. I then gave the skittles a mass of 10 and the bowling ball a mass of 20.

The next thing to do was to give momentum to the ball. To do this I used the autokey on frame 5 and moved the ball forward a bit and gave it slight rotation. I then made sure that on the 'preview and animation' tab I made the starting frame at about 3, not 1, as the ball would just drop and no momentum would show.

The final tweak was on the 'Havok 1 world' tab was to change the collateral tolerance to about 0.6 so the skittles will not 'jump' when the animation starts.

This reactor tool is becoming more useful than I thought! It will be very useful in my final animation and I look forward to utilising its power!

Using the reactor tool

This tutorial uses the reactor tool. I already used this once when creating the smashing wall in an earlier blog entry but this tutorial halped me understand the tool in more detail.

The first thing to try was a simple dropping a box onto another. This uses gravity to create an animation. First thing to do was to create a rigid body collection. I did this by going to animation > reactor > create object > rigid body collection. I then slected all the items that will be used in the animation and put them into the collection.

Then gave the falling box a mass of 10. But I kept the base box at 0. This means that the base box will not be affected by gravity and will act as a sort of plane.

By selecting 'Preview Animation in Window' I can see how it turns out. It went just as it was meant to and made a realistic falling action.

Using bipeds to walk and move

Bipeds are very useful for creating movements of the human body. Using the footsteps tool I could create a simple step movement. I could use lots of auto placed steps or manually place them in the scene.

By elevating the footsteps using the move tool I could make the biped step up stairs.

By using layers and the auto key I could move the body parts of the biped such as the head and arms. At each keyframe I could change the position (e.g. the head) and make it look as if the biped is looking around. Here was my finished result:

Morpher Tool

This tutorial showed me how to animate a human face using the morpher tool.

I imported the 'head.obj' and changed it to an editable poly. I then copied the head 3 times, naming each of them a diiferent expression: open mouth, closed eyes, raised eyebrows.

I then selected the the mouth of the the 'open mouth' head. I selected the two front lip polygons and used the grow tool select more of them. When the jaw area was selected I could move it downwards creating a open mouth.

Then I created the closed eyes by selecting the underneath polygons of the eye lids and moved them downwards.

Lastly I selected the 'raised eyebrows' head and selected each eye brow area. Then by moving them upwards I created the raised eyebrow effect.

With all targets now having an expression, I can select the original head and select the morpher modifier. On the menu on the right I right-clicked on the 'empty' and chose pick from scene. Then I could choose either one of the other expressions. I can repeat the process for the other expressions. I then was able to move the slider up and down and this affected the original head with all the expressions.

I then could TurboSmooth the original head to give it a more life-like look.

I then used the auto key to create the animation to show the expressions changing. At each keyframe I moved the slider to change the face.

I could then open the curve editor to individually change the animation of an expression.

This was a very fun tool to use and would be very useful for character design.



Using the reactor tool

For my animation I want to incorporate the cannon firing at a wall. I researched into using the Rayfire tool but I found out that it is not in the standard 3DS Max.

To get a similar effect I used the reactor tool.

I created a brick wall (made by separate bricks) and a boulder (sphere).
It is important to lift up all objects slightly so it is not touching the plane as this can mess things up.

I had to add a plain to the scene (using the reactor tool set shown on left).
I then selected all the objects and made them into a rigid body collection (top tool on the left). The next step was to select just the bricks and use the fracture tool (also on left).

I then selected the reactor tab under utilities. Under the properties rollout I added a mass to the bricks and the ball (the ball being considerably heavier). When the ball is selected it was important to check the "unyielding" box under properties.

I then had to animate the ball moving through the wall using the autokey.

From here I could preview the animation to see if it worked and it did!