Is reactor unsuable?

[BrandonD]

Myself and Jason Crosby used Reactor BIGTIME on a film called "Final Destination II." Does it have problems, yes. Is it a very powerful and capable rigid/soft body dynamics system, yes. The documentation is pretty basic, but it doesn't take long to figure out - it's very intuitive.

[Chris Thomas]

Unusable? well no.... depends what you want it for, presonaly I think it s pretty neat system. however unless I missed something it does seem limited in its acceptance of animated input. I tired a test that had a dynamic vehicle (quite sophisticated, independant drive and suspension, flexible mid point) but do you think I could steer the thing..... I'll try again soon, there may be a way around this....

Its a great package, just has limitations thats all, as do most (try colliding two soft bodies in maya......)

Chris Thomas
www.christopher-thomas.net

[sepehr]

It seems I have judged very soon.
I hadn't worked with constraints in Reactor...

But still I find the toy car unusable.
And the Reactor manual is not a good one.
The person has to read entire of manual to find what he wants
and still it lacks of detailed description.

I couldn't make the objects move on a conveyour belt as a deformable shape
because of fraction.

I'll post the problems if I can't solve them tonight...

[sepehr]

Ok, another problem which is more improtant to me:
How may I attach a rigid body to a point of a rope?
(The reverse one ,attaching a rope point to a rigid body is easy)
Here I want to use something like dashpot or spring to use the effect
of gravity streching the rope.
But spring only connects two rigid bodies.
What's your idea?
Suppose I wanna have a person climbing a rope...
(this one seems to be impossible using Reactor)
Or a very simpler situation an object hanging using a rope.
Do you know any other program for 3dmax to do these?

[gundog]

i haven't really got into using reactor, but as far as hanging something. you should be able to have a cylinder with a pathdeform spacewarp modifier use the rope spline for deformation. and use an attachment controller on the hanging object and select any face on the cylinder for an attachment point.

[BrandonD]

I've done some pretty complex cyclical dependancies with Reactor without a problem. For example, several fence posts connected with barb wire flying through the air, landing on the ground and tangling up. The posts are Rigid Bodies and the barbwire are Ropes attached to the rigid bodies with AttachRB modifiers. The cool thing is that these attachments can be set to either pass their motion onto the rigid bodies or ignore them.

So to attach a rope to a rigid body you add a SplineSelect or EditSpline to the top of the Rope stack. Then pass this to an AttachRB modifier and choose the Rigid Body you want it constrained too. This is a way to constrain a rope to an object, but you can also constrain a rope to world space by just passing the Rope modifier a selection instead of a whole object. It's all covered in the manual.

[derelict]

yo BrandonD,

You work in the movie industry? Is there really a final Destination 2? Are the Wong guys still the main writers? would reaaallly like to know.:)

Whatever you're doing .... May you score a bountiful harvest!!

[sepehr]

Hey BrandonD.
That procedure worked...(Not affect rigid bodies unchecked)
Thnx

[Sgt.ArchAngel]

yeah there is a final destination 2 comming out scheduled for march 2003

Starring Ali Larter, Tony Todd, Andrew Downing

Director(s) David Ellis

Screenwriter(s) Eric Bress, J. Mackye Gruber

Studio New Line Cinema

Production Company Zide Entertainment

[sepehr]

OK,I left playing with the reactor cuz I thought the problem has been solved.
But here you see I faced a problem again.
There is a badge attached to a rope.
I have even cut the cloth so that it is considered as a rigid body,
not a deformable shape.
The unyielding option is checked for the jacket.
the rope is attached to the badge and "do not effect the rigid body" is unchecked.
The substeps/key in this animation is 100 but I tried also with 1000 and still the rope
goes through the jacket instead of getting the proper shape.
What's wrong?

Thanks in advance
P.S The higher quality preview:http://www.cgtal.com/temp/test.swf

[sepehr]

I searched for some old posts for reactor here and
found that many guys have had my problem.
The reactor seems to be an uncompleted program which
can only handle rigid body and very low poly clothes.
It's slow.(the worse thing)
I tried some simulations in SimCloth and found it better.
(I downloaded it 4 hours ago and in this 4 hours I've got
very better results with cloths than I could have these days using reactor).
So as I said before reactor seems to need lots of changes in order to do what is needed.
Regards
Sepehr
:curious:

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