CGTalk - Reactor and Expression/Wiring Question

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Mattrne

01-19-2006, 05:30 PM

Ive just moved over to Max from Maya and have just discovered the Raction controller. I currently have a object with a custom attribute on it which I have wired to control the scaling of a joint. I have then created another object with a different custom attribute on which I want to use to drive numerous custom attributes on other object (the bone scaling being one). However when I hook this up to my original object via the reaction manager, using several different states the originasl object no longer drives the scaling on the bone. I can quite easily just setup reaction instead of the wiring, but I'm just wondering if anyone knows why setting up a reaction to a wired/expression driven object breaks the setup? (I hope that makes sense!)

CarlosA

01-19-2006, 11:34 PM

maybe your are overwirtting the origianl controller?
try using a list controller. this way you can use a wire controller and add a reaction controller on top of that.
hope this is of some use.
cheers,
Los.

Mattrne

01-20-2006, 01:12 PM

OK thanks, I'll give that a try.

PEN

01-20-2006, 01:24 PM

Can I mention that you said you are controlling the scale of a joint. If you are looking at creating a stretchy joint don't control the scale, that is a bad idea in Max. Never scale at the object level in Max. Max only carries one matrix for the position, rotation and scale so this can have effects on the joints that you don't want. Instead what you want to do is wire the X position of the child bone of the bone that you want to scale. This will do what you want. You can also set the bone to squash and stretch if you want.

You might already know this but I use both packages and know what mistakes a typicaly made when people go from one to the other.

Mattrne

01-20-2006, 01:34 PM

Thanks for the heads up Paul. I'm now wondering if I'm going about this the correct way!

The setup is a joint say 'Risorius' with a child of 'Risorius_END'. I also have two locators, one called 'Start' and one called 'End'. The 'Risorius' bone is linked to the Start object to zero out its translations etc and the End locator is also linked to this locator. I then constrain the position of 'Risorius_End' to 'End' and aim constrain 'Risorius' to 'End. Now this allows me to position the start and end locators where the 'muscle' joint should anchor at both ends, whilst keeping the scale of 'Risorius' at 100% (this whole rig has to be re-used on numerous heads).

I am going to setup controls on the rig which once active disable the above constraints and drive the scales of the bones, to act like muscles expanding and contracting, this way I dont need to have a massive animation dataset - just the scales on the bones, so it should in theory help re-use of animations. I have made sure from the 'bone tools' that 'Freeze joint' is set to off by the way.

Does that make sense? Can you forsee this workflow not doing what I'm expecting? It seems to be ok so far!

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