animating a building constructing

[Jhonus]

Do you need cranes and the like?

Sounds like a big job.

The easiest thing i can think of is to do a screen capture or render every couple of minutes as you build it in 3D. But that depends heavily on the style they want.

How realistic do they want it?

The other thing you could do is use animated masks for external surfaces, like floor boards or gib board. just render out the entire surface on a layer and animate the mask to reveal it bit by bit.

[anthonymcgrath]

rendering every coupla mins as you build!? Can you imagine this with the client factor involved?!!!

"can you go back and rebuild the model. can you change this bit and that bit up there? can you have it done in an hour?"

my my, that would be funny.


masks will def work with as you mentioned but I'd love to try n suss out some nice procedural method for large areas of repetitive construction. have to talk to the coder on this method tho.

I think its gonna take a plethora of methods but thanks anyway. keep the posts coming ppl. :airguitar

[svenip]

you could use the naming of your bricks. if you do it right and name them something like this

brick_01...brick_100

then you could use mel to animate the visibility for the bricks in a frame and then just render out as an animation.

[anthonymcgrath]

hey svenip, you couldn't show me how to write the scripting to animate the display of consecutive bricks could you? I'm really a newcomer to the mel side.

[svenip]

so one aesy one might be this one

float $i;
float $brick_count,$brick,$how_often,$maxFrame;
$brick = 0;
$often = 5; // variable to control at which frames the next appears (5 = every 5th frame)
$brick_count = 20; // how many bricks you have !?

$maxFrame = $brick_count * $often;

for($i=0;$i<=$maxFrame;$i+=$often)
{
currentTime $i-1 ;
setAttr "brick_"+$brick+".visibility" 0;
setKeyframe "brick_"+$brick+".v";
currentTime $i ;
setAttr "brick_"+$brick+".visibility" 1;
setKeyframe "brick_"+$brick.v";
$brick+=1;
}

should work :hmm:

sorry right at the moment i'm a bit lack of time and cannot test everything right out. tonight i will do this.

[svenip]

sorry just saw that i've forgot something

string $command;
float $i;
float $brick_count,$brick,$how_often,$maxFrame;
$brick = 0;
$often = 5; // variable to control at which frames the next appears (5 = every 5th frame)
$brick_count = 20; // how many bricks you have !?

$maxFrame = $brick_count * $often;

for($i=0;$i<=$maxFrame;$i+=$often)
{
currentTime $i-1 ;
$command = "setAttr \"brick_\"+$brick+\".visibility\" 0;";
eval $command
$command = "setKeyframe \"brick_\"+$brick+\".v\";";
eval command;
currentTime $i ;
$command = "setAttr \"brick_\"+$brick+\".visibility\" 1;";
eval $command
$command = "setKeyframe \"brick_\"+$brick+\".v\";";
eval command;
$brick+=1;
}
:hmm: :hmm:

[anthonymcgrath]

wondered why it weren't working!

:bowdown:

[svenip]

can you send me your file, then i can look and fit the script.

:bounce: :bounce: :bounce:

[anthonymcgrath]

our coder guru managed to sit down and get something running using what you (svenip) wrote and tweaked it a bit. it were quite enlightening actually as its pretty much my first foray into mel. gonna take books home and swot up!

I dont actually have a scene yet. (well, polycube scaled 2units in x, and duped another 9times 2units in xtranslation for test purposes!)

I'm just doing some research on the effect first. I'm probably gonna use masks for walls and architecture in the distance, but I thought it would be nice if I could get the foreground walls that will be in shot to build in sequence using actual brick visibility.

would be even cooler if I can get the same script to control the shader transparency so I could get them to fade up as opposed to pop up.

anyway svenip, thanks for your help on this matter. if you think up any other ways then they'd be most appreciated.

thanks again
ant
uk

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