Thanks! Yea, I was thinking she needed a belt also. Next time I’m working on her I’ll add something. Also someone at work today pointed out that she should have a bikers patch on the back of her vest. Which is a cool idea.
FXWARS: THE RACE! Mathew Foscarini
mustan9
#43
This week was a bust for me, because it’s tax month and was spending my evenings putting together all my invoices and stuff like that.
I’ve been doing a lot of highway driving this week, and really wanted to go home tonight and give a crack at the heat effect you see on the surface of the road. So I worked out this shader for the road surface.
Crits are welcome. Thanks.
tibes
#44
It’s a good start! It needs a bit of left-right distortion though, and some blurring. You might do that with particle effects in post. I was considering doing something like that in my entry, but I don’t think I’ll have time to get it done.
Know what you mean about this week being a write-off, I haven’t made much progress either. :argh:
mustan9
#45
I just picked this up for $679 (Canadian).
AMD X2 3800+ 64-bit CPU
2 Gigs Ram
nVidia 6200 with 256Meg
120Gig HD
2 DVD-RW drives (dual-layer)
Lots of memory card slots for digital cameras and stuff like that.
Running Windows Media Center XP.
I think that’s a good buy for the money. Should help with the renderings. It’s funny, because I was looking to upgrade the memory on my Xeon render machine and Dell was asking about $300 per 512MB, because that kind of ram was out of stock. So for the price of 1 Gig of ram I got a new machine.
If anyone has DDR 24x16 ECC memory they would like sell me, please send me a note.
mustan9
#46
Well, I’ve got to send this into Autodesk.
If you create a Blend material in Max, and use any procedural texture as for the blend channel it will cause MentalRay to deadlock when computing final gather. I can reproduce this with SP1, SP2 and the latest SP3 for 3D Studio Max 8.
So basicly my new road shader I was so happy with is causing me problems, and my scene is deadlocking on frames 164 to 180. If I load the scene, and then manually render just frame 179 it deadlocks MR.
Does anyone know of another way to create a blending of two materials, but just using MR shader nodes in Max?
Thanks,
P.S. This is the first time I’ve seen MR deadlock in Max. I’ve seen it happen lots of times in Maya.
mustan9
#48
Actually, it turns out that it’s the blend material itself causing the problem. Doesn’t matter what sub-textures are used. Even procedurals or bitmaps.
I didn’t have any time today to do anything. Been modelling clothing for work, but I’ll post some shots of what I rendered last night. I’ve had it with Max’s hair. Mental Ray keeps screwing it up. So I think I will replace her hair with a halmet.
All crits are welcome.
mustan9
#49
I finished the rigging of the motorcycle. When I first started this I assumed that you wouldn’t need any real rig for the bike. Just throw on a character, place the axis somewhere handy and start animating.
I was wrong 
Here’s what I worked out today.
There are 8 key controls on the bike.
“lean” allows the animator to lean the bike side to side, while automaticly adjusting the center of gravity. So if the bike is running in a straight line this parameter will sway the bike back and forth.
“rear slip” allows the animator to have the rear tire slip left to right. It works correctly even if the bike is leaning around a turn. You can quickly animate a slip out on the rider with just this parameter.
“front slip” does the same as the above except on the front tire. Example: if the rider tries to make a turn, but the front tire slips out.
“acc./brake” This controls the nose lifting, and diving of the bike. A positive value from 0 to 25.0 will raise the front shocks, and lower the rear spring but keep both tires on the ground. Above 25.0 the nose of the bike starts to raise off the ground. Above 50 to 100 is used for doing wheelies. If you apply a value from 0 to -25.0 this simulates heavy breaking with the weight of the bike transferring to the front, lowering the shocks, and diving the nose downwards.
“stearing” does what it says. Swings the stearing bar back and forth. The bipeds hands follow the grips of the bike.
“Front W [lock]” and “Rear W [lock]” stands for front/rear wheel locking. This is an interger value of 0 or 1. If the value is 1 then the wheels are free to spin. They will follow the forward motion of the bike, and a MaxScript expression calculates the right amount of spin for the tires. When you animate this value to 0 it causes the tire to suddenly lock up (stop rotating). This can be used to animate the effect of hitting the brakes.
“Rear W [spin]” an additional spin value that is applied by the MaxScript expression on the rear tire. In the taking off video example I’m able to apply an additional tire rotation before the bike starts moving. The higher the value the faster the tire will rotate. Once the bike starts moving forward the spin value can be lowered and the tire will match the speed of the bike.
Examples of this parameters animated are here. All the bike animation was done using the controls, and only the position of the bike was done by hand. Each animation was finished in just a few minutes so once the rig was done it’s easy to work with.
“Example of the bike breaking”
http://www.mathew3d.com/fxwars/therace02.mov
“Example of the bike taking off”
http://www.mathew3d.com/fxwars/therace03.mov
Anyway, crits are welcome.
LightFreeze
#51
Impressive stuff so far, looks good, my only crits would be on the bike taking off, the wheel spin should be much faster and should get there quicker maybe think about fake blurring the wheel spin as the strobe effect with cg can make it look strange and when she releases the break I think it should be more explosive as the bike takes off
that said excellent stuff
mustan9
#52
thanks tibes!
It looked fine in the viewport preview, but your right I think I’m getting a strobe effect. I had motion blur turned on. I worry that I’ll spend the week end rendering my shots only to find that the tires look like their turning backwards! That would be no fun.
The next part of the rig I have to do is the the dynamics setup. I’m hoping to apply it overtop of this rig, and post some early crash tests as well.
destruct007
#53
you’re doing a hell of of a job on this! You’ve really got a lot of work done! Impressive, so 2 ideas, 1, don’t forget to leave time for fx 
and have you considered making the time of day dusk, you have such cool envoronment if you make it sunset it could be even cooler! Then you could even turn on the streetlights and have more dramatic shadows.
mustan9
#54
Thanks buddy,
21 days left. arg! :banghead:
I have a roughed in rig for the crash, and I’m most likely going to drop the other bike. Replacing it with two of this bike with different drivers. At least then I don’t have to rig another bike, because I’m just running out of time.
I would will look into changing the lighting for the scenes. The down side with daylight is that it’s heavy on the final gather calculations. Doesn’t look good unless you get the right amount of samples.
Also, the envoriment has most in it. There is a bridge, signs, and a tunnel. They all just need texturing. I should post an example of my envoriment building MaxScript. Takes a template scene file, and creates a highway with it. Like lego blocks it snaps peices together creating a highway as long as you want, with X number of signs, street lights, bridges, and tunnels.
I’ve got to run out to work, but maybe tonight I’ll post an example of what I’m talking about.
mustan9
#55
Would you call it a highway? or a freeway? or maybe a speedway? Eitherway I created a simple MaxScript that allows me to construct a highway quickly.
It works by taking a template Max scene file, and snapping together sections of the highway in a straight line. If you want the highway to bend then you have to add a bend modifier to the sections you want.
In the template file everything is done with layers. The road, walls, lights, bridge and dividers are all on different layers. The script then loads this template file, and arranges copies of objects on those layers in a straight line.
You can quickly change if you want 4 lights in a row, followed by a bridge, and then 4 more lights in a row.
A simple section of the highway
A section with a street light
A section with a bridge
Once you have run the script telling it you want 3 street lights, followed by a bridge, and then 3 more street lights. You get something like this.
After executing the script
It’s easy to add new types of sections for the highway (such as a tunnel). You just create a new layer, and add the geometry for the tunnel. Then in the script you tell it to build a section as a tunnel. I won’t go into to much detail on how the script works, because it’s simple but I will share it with you.
-- this is a function that will instance all the objects in a layer to another layer, and
-- adjust their position
function clone_layer fromLayer toLayer pos =
(
clearSelection()
fromLayer.select true
toLayer.current = true
for s in $ do
(
local n = instance s
move n pos
)
clearSelection()
)
-- this function clones the highway to create a section that has a street light
function create_streetlight layer pos =
(
local asphalt = LayerManager.getLayerFromName "Asphalt"
local streetLights = LayerManager.getLayerFromName "StreetLights"
local walls = LayerManager.getLayerFromName "Walls"
clone_layer asphalt layer pos
clone_layer streetLights layer pos
clone_layer walls layer pos
)
-- this function clones the highway to create a section that has a street light
function create_street_nolight layer pos =
(
local asphalt = LayerManager.getLayerFromName "Asphalt"
local dividers = LayerManager.getLayerFromName "Dividers"
local walls = LayerManager.getLayerFromName "Walls"
clone_layer asphalt layer pos
clone_layer dividers layer pos
clone_layer walls layer pos
)
-- this function creates a highway of n'th length made up of street lights
-- NOTE: Count must be dividable by 2
function build_straight_highway layer start count hwOffset =
(
local o = hwOffset * start
for i = 0 to count-1 do
(
create_streetlight layer (o+(hwOffset * (i*2)))
create_street_nolight layer (o+(hwOffset * ((i*2)+1)))
)
)
-- this function inserts a section of highway that has a bridge over it
function build_bridge layer pos hwOffset =
(
local asphalt = LayerManager.getLayerFromName "Asphalt"
local bridge = LayerManager.getLayerFromName "Bridge"
clone_layer asphalt layer (hwOffset * pos)
clone_layer bridge layer (hwOffset * pos)
)
-- the utility function used to build the highway
utility highwayBuilder "Highway Builder"
(
local highway_template = "d:/BikeRace/Highway/Highway_Template.max"
local highwayOffset = [0,350,0]
button btn1 "Build"
on btn1 pressed do
(
messageBox "Going to build highway."
actionMan.executeAction 0 "40004" -- File: New Scene
loadMaxFile highway_template
layer = LayerManager.newLayer()
layer.setName "HighwayGeometry"
layer.current = true
build_straight_highway layer 1 3 highwayOffset
build_bridge layer 7 highwayOffset
build_straight_highway layer 6 3 highwayOffset
)
)
Bonedaddy
#56
That’s pretty awesome. Your stuff is definitely coming along well. Can’t wait to see the crash.
Escopos
#57
Very Cool. I enjoy seeing your enthusiasm for this project (lots of work dude). Eager to see what comes next.
mustan9
#58
Thanks guys for the possitive comments. They really are enjoyed 
Well, as of the start of this week I find myself again looking for work. I finished those television spots I talked about before, but don’t have anything lined up after them. So I’m taking a bit of a vacation. I haven’t had a vacation since the summer of 2004. If anyone knows of someone hiring please point them to my website or this thread.
Now back to this FX stuff.
I have finished the rigging the motorcycle with constraints for collision. There is still more that I want to do including body deformation, breaking glass, and of cource the rag doll setup for the rider. It’s hard to think that we only have 18 days left! I see myself rendering everything at the last minute :banghead:
My collision rig is using reactor on a proxy mesh of the motorcycle. This allows me to setup the collision dynamics the way I want, and replace the geometry of the bike later. I have a WIP of a higher detailed bike that will be installed into my rig tomorrow (maybe tonight).
The above collision rig has breakable constraint joints on small details of the bike such as the mirrors, turn signals, and exhaust system. If anyone has anymore ideas of what to add to the setup please let me know.
Once this is done I can use the bike animation rig (shown previously) to animate the bike towards a point of collision. Example: Rider racing towards a car. Then I just allow reactor to take over the animation and calculate the crash.
Here is a test animation of the motorcycle hitting an object (no rider at this stage). The next stage in setup will be creating the collision constraints for the rider.
http://www.mathew3d.com/fxwars/crashTest01.mov
Crits are welcome!
mustan9
#60
I have finished remodelling the speed bike. I just did as little as possible, but still added more details. Especially for the tires, and brakes. The body panels have been redone in a quad polygon so I can crush them in collisions (I hope!).
Here’s the new bike.
Here’s the bike in different colors. Still thinking about what color. I may add some racing stripes.
