CGTalk - Reactor: Rope (Newbie)

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ashgibney

11-24-2004, 01:16 PM

Hi, this is my first post, but I've been watching this forum for a while now. I've looked for pages upon pages. 1 thread on the first page helped, but it didn't help enough.
Anyway, this reactor is really annoying me, I don't understand it at all, so this is a very newbie question.
I'm trying to make a mechanical object that has a pipe/wire going from a gas container to the object, the container is sitting on the object, and i want the wire to hang. So when it moves from side to side, the wire flaps about.
I've made the spline, modified it to rope reactor, clicked on vertex and made the two vertexes "attach to rigid body" then selected the container and the object as "rigid bodies". But now I'm stuck. If I loft it into a wire, it will lose the rope reactor, so I'm stuck with a spline, attaching it, didn't seem to do anything, it just sits there still as it was before I added the reactor modifier. Also when I move the object, the spline doesn't appear to be "attached".
I can't find any tutorials on this.
I hope someone can answer. I'm sorry if this is a newbie question
Thanks

Yourworstnightmare

11-24-2004, 04:29 PM

Hi Bobcat,

I think I understand what you mean, first of all the spline can be rendered with a predefined width making it look like a pipe\wire. Second, in order for the spline to react with the object the object must be in a dm collection, after which you must create the simulation by going to the reactor rollout an preview and and animation and hit the "create animation" button. Also the timeline in max must be the same length as reactors timeline.

Largo39

11-24-2004, 04:33 PM

oook.. you asked like 10 questions but ill try to answer as many as i can.

first of all, to give your wire some"thickness" you can make the spline renderable and give it thickness there. OR you can go into the rope modifier and give THAT thickness. i would suggest making the spline renderable because then it can have a texture.

2nd: make sure you have a rope COLLECTION and add your spline (which has the rope modifier) to that collection. also give your rope some mass in the rope modfier menus. make sure your objects are in a rigid body collection and give the object that is hanging from the rope some mass as well.

3rd: make sure your spline has been divided MANY times so tehre is lots of verticies (16-32 should be good). if you just have a line with no verticies in the middle the rope won't bend

4th: where are you movign the box? if you are moving it in regular max mode with viewports than nothing will happen. to get the reactor window clikc on "preview animation" and a little window pops upw ith your scene (make sure your graphics driver is either set to opengl or directx, to do that click on customize on your main menu, then "preferences", hit the "viewport" tab and hit "choose driver"). in the reactor window you can move the object around by right clikcing it and flinging it around.

once youve made your animation you can hit create animation and then its loaded onto max.

hope i got all your questions.

ashgibney

11-24-2004, 05:32 PM

Thanks to both of you, I managed to fix a few problems on the rope as well as other places too. But the reactor still doesn't work. I created a rope collection, added the spline, but when I goto Preview Animation it comes up with an Error Box saying the two "Attach to RigidBody" objects are not part of the simulation, "please add it".
I don't know what this means.
I tried adding the two objects to a dm collection, but this didn't seem to do anything

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