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View Full Version : help in approaching animation of engine parts breakdown

Piotrek255
05-14-2009, 04:53 PM
I recently modeled an engine and all of its parts are separated, now i want to make an animation of moving all of the engine parts away so the camera could see all of them at once, and then an animation of assembling them so that they would form an engine again.

I don't want the animation to be linear, it would be great if they could go along the curve path, but the path constraint does not have any options of softening the speed and movement by for example a bezier curve, the only curve i can set in the curve editor for "along path" parameter is linear curve...

Did anyone completed such project or a similar one and can give me some hints?

thanks in advance
Karnageddon
05-14-2009, 06:03 PM
What you can try doing is setting up a custom slider that is wired to the "along path" of the engine components you are animating. You should be able to control the slider now using the curve editor.
Piotrek255
05-14-2009, 06:12 PM
EDIT - i wired the parameter to the along path value, but when the value is 1 the animation loops back... how to change the scale so that value 1000 would be the end of the animation, not value = 1

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how to make a slider and wire it to some function like the along path function?

I saw that in many reels but i could not find how to do that. where is it in the 3dmax help file? could you give a hint how to find some tutorials about wiring? or if this is not a long thing to do, could you write how to do that in short?
Karnageddon
05-14-2009, 07:36 PM
A custom slider should not loop, im assuming you are using the default slider found in helper/manipulators/slider? In which case its fine, we can work with this too.

First change the 'maximum' value of the slider to 1 and make sure 'snap value' is enabled and set to 0.01
This will prevent the engine component from going beyond 100% of its path, preventing loop. So when the slider hits a value of 1, the path will be 100%. (100%=1 value, 50%=0.5 value, 25%=0.25 value, 1%=0.01 value).

You are unable to modify it to 1000 because it would be mathematically incorrect. A percentage is converted to a decimal by this method: If you wanted the decimal value for 50%, divide 50 into 100 and you get .5 as the decimal value.
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05-14-2009, 07:36 PM
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