CGTalk - dynamics om r5

Aaron Moore

12-10-2002, 10:47 PM

The dynamics in Maya are nice because they are interactive and real time in the viewport. In max it seems far from interactive. Whats the deal? Why did they even bother including reactor as part of r5? It isn't very easy to setup simple things...

I've just been doing some modeling with R5 since i got it but i was wonder about how powerful reactor is. I am working on a car model (some of u may have seen the wip) and i eventually wanted to setup some ik rig to drive the vehicle. I was hoping that i could use some kind of dynamics to control the ik but i don't know how easy this would be to setup in max.

What do you think is the state of dynamics in r5 and do you honestly think that reactor is a solution to dynamics. It seems more like a hacked on extension rather than an intergrated component.

BrandonD

12-10-2002, 11:16 PM

Well it's a different approach than Maya's dynamics, something both good and bad depending on how you look at it. It has support for springs, so if that's what you're looking for then it's in there. There's actually several kinds of constraints in Reactor. The interactive mode is done in a pop-up DX/OpenGL window. This is really cool because it only loads in the geometry you want to deal with. You can interact with the dynamics, pause, manipulate, then save them out. You don't have to use this preview mode, but instead can process the sim within MAX. Doing so bakes the animation into the current transform tracks (which you of course can remove or modify), something that makes it flawless for network rendering (something where Maya dynamics are a pain). Softbodies are handled two ways, vertex-based (similar to Maya's particle-based method) or FFD Lattice based. The latter is extremely fast and often is all you need. And unlike Maya, you can have multiple softbodies react to each other (as if that situation comes up often...hehe).

Is it perfect? No. Is it good and useful in production? Yes.

Aaron Moore

12-11-2002, 03:29 AM

is it feasible to setup a rig for a vehicle using the iks in max? I'm new to iking in max

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