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View Full Version : Gravitation, Wind and other Dynamics usefull for Mel?

Milho
08-22-2003, 10:49 AM
Has anyone experimented with Dynamics through MEL?
e.g. can you write effects which relate on mayas dynacmics?
For gravity it's simple, cause you only need the direction and the gravitation factor. But how about much more complicated stuff.

I just thought about doing stuff like rigid body simulation in mel on my own. But it would be stupid to have new dynamic influence as addribute rather than using the default influences.
Laeng
08-25-2003, 12:36 PM
Of course you can write your own dynamics. I would say that a big part of the Maya Dynamics package is written in MEL too. Rewriting the dynamics would give you a lot of creative space, and some of the influence fields arenīt hard to write, but I guess that things will get messy when it comes to collisions. Collisions and the resulting forces are harder to calculate, and especially harder to optimize considering calculation times. You will probably want a good UI too.
I donīt think itīs usefull to completely rewrite the Dynamics,
but it could be a good exercise to do a part of it, if you want to get deeper into MEL. Anyway, you should get a good book on vector mathematics and the basic physical formulars. Test your fields on particle grids first, so you can see how the behave in a volume.

Maybe you can post some results if you decide to do so.
mark_wilkins
09-01-2003, 09:16 AM
Actually NONE of the dynamics engine is implemented in MEL, and when you're trying to do dynamics it's usually best to try to get the most leverage that you can out of the built-in dynamics engine before trying to tweak with expressions.

The book mentioned in my signature devotes almost half its length to discussing using MEL for dynamics examples, so if you get a chance, take a look.

-- Mark
Milho
09-01-2003, 02:41 PM
Ouch! I got your book laying next to me. Had no chance to read it seriously. I'd better do so and rethink my ideas :blush:
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