Lathe with Dynamics Problem

[gaggle]

MissAnne, the dynamics of pre-MAX R5 is an.. interesting experience. It's a bit like MAX's NURBS, they haven't been updated since forever, and they just feel pretty outdated by now. I can't help you directly, it's been ages since I've played with the dynamics-thing. I don't think a lot of people uses MAX4's dynamics.. heck, I don't even think a lot of people have bothered ever checking it out :)

I am going to suggest a plugin though :) Actually two, since if you're in a buying-mood there's Reactor, a fairly powerful very all-round dynamics-solution. It comes built-in with MAX5, and it's useable as a complete replacement for the dynamics system you're currently battling with. It's pretty nice.

But the free option might be interesting as well, idunno if you know of "SimCloth"? Hit it up over at Scriptspot (http://www.scriptspot.com). It has quite neato rigid-body dynamics. I recall there being some.. issues or whatnot, when asking SimCloth to do.. I think softbody/rigidbody interaction. Anyways, check it out, it's designed to be a cloth-simulation-plugin, but it solves rigidbody fast, and you can easily tweak its parameters to do softbody jell-o type objects. Hooray.

[MissAnne]

Wow. That was a fast reply.

We have to do this 30 second animation for our school assignment and our group decided to simulate a jar full of jellybeans falling over and our instructor suggested instead of cloning each jelly bean and drawing a line where the jellybean will go - research Dynamics.

After playing around with it all afternoon it's soo frustrating :shrug:

So after reading your reply and you understanding more what I need to accomplish - is it best to not use the Dynamics built into 3ds Max 4 and instead go for a plug in?

One more thing - I went to that script site and presumed it was just an exe plugin installation but the zip files contains 5 bmp images and a *.ms file. How do I install them? Even just a url to a site would be great.

Thank you soo kindly in advance.

[AJ]

Get Simcloth from here -

http://www.chaosgroup.com/SimCloth.html

That should make more sense :D

[gaggle]

Indeed AJ_23, good linkage, I hadn't actually checked Scriptspot.. shame on me :)

MissAnne, maybe the built-in dynamics could work.. I mean.. I don't know, but it doesn't sound neccessairly out of its reach. The thing is though, that in my experience the weakness in the MAX dynamics is that objects have a tendency to fall through eachother. My pessimistic forecast would be that the jellybeans would tumble into the jar, but then as they were settling some of them would start falling through eachother.. it's just this.. thing it does.

It's not my experience that Reactor has such a problem. Now, hundreds of jellybeans is a mouthful for any dynamics-simulation, but it does sound like a job Reactor would like to take care of.

But that costs money (either buying Reactor as a plugin or get it "for free" by upgrading to MAX5). Also, Reactor isn't neccessairly something you pick up in a few hours. It's not terribly complicated, but it does have its own inner logic..

SimCloth though, in my experience, is very straight-forward. Take the jellybean (make sure it's reasonably lowpoly), apply the SimCloth modifier on it and set it to Rigid Body, then apply a SimCloth modifier on the jar and set it to Deflector, hit Simulate, and.. that might be enough.. I may be forgetting some steps, but that's the basics of it.
I think you can select all of your jellybeans at once, apply one SimCloth modifier, set the settings as they should be, and then hit the "Make Unique" button, that ought to apply the SimCloth to each individual bean. I don't think it'll work if it's just one SimCloth modifier that's on a bunch of objects (though I may be wrong on that one). The "Make Unique" button is located right next to "Show End Result", just under the stack-window.. window.. thingie.. with the Editable Mesh and modifiers and whatnot.

I think I'd give SimCloth a try, it's free, easy to install, and it should be possible to only waste a few hours on it to see if it seems like it'd work. Just keep your deadline in mind and stop playing around with fun plugins in due time if just seems like too much work to get it done.


Hey just a weird ponder, but you could shoot the jellybeans quickly one after another into the jar and have the jar affected by the impacts, being pushed slightly across the groundplane :D

Ah, just a thought. Best of luck on the project, sounds kinda fun :)

[MissAnne]

Thank you so much for recommending this program to me. Using SimCloth is ten times more easier than using Dynamics because mainly the objects don't bounce a million times like it does in Max/Dynamics unless you get the Bounce/Friction/Static whatever it is settings finely tuned.

I've set up a nice rolling ball that comes out of a lathe vase that has falling down onto the floor within 5 minutes. :D

I am worried a bit about rendering time for over 50+ jellybeans though :eek:

Too bad it's 2am here in Australia atm or else I be playing around with this plug in a bit more. Bed time for me. Have school in the morning.

Will keep you posted how my jelly bean animation is going. Again - thank you Gaggle for replying to my post. It's great to see responses so quickly and so detailed especially when I just started posting msgs on this board today.

BTW: Reason we chose to do a jelly bean coming out of a jar is because our group has done a previous assignment together under the group name "The Last Green Bean" and we thought we make a animation of that name (kinda like how Universal and Twentieth Century Fox do their intro's before the movies start)

[MissAnne]

Oh and thank you AJ 23 for the link because I wouldn't be able to download it without you.

That scriptspot site didn't make much sense to me..esp the *.ms file :hmm: :thumbsup:

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