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Any 3D Max Pros around?

S

Stiganator

Platinum Member
When I move level A up and down I want the platform to move. I think the pic makes this clear.

Using 3D Studio MAX to try this out.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. 🙂
 
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I use Maya, not 3DSM, and I'm not that good with creating physics, but you'd probably have to make them rigid bodies or something one at a time to get them to react to each other instead of as one...

Are you trying to figure out the whole thing, or just how to get them to work as independant pieces instead of one big piece... or something else?
 
I'm trying to get them to interact as independent pieces with constraints, but I don't know how to contrain them, linear or rotation or maybe its something else?
 
what do you mean by stimuli? I want them to be able to collide and properly utilize the pinned levers. When I am setting up the animation, I want to be able to select the lever and rotate it up and see everything else move around too. Does that answer your question?
 
Originally posted by: Stiganator
what do you mean by stimuli? I want them to be able to collide and properly utilize the pinned levers. When I am setting up the animation, I want to be able to select the lever and rotate it up and see everything else move around too. Does that answer your question?
Click to expand...

Kind of.

What I'm asking is if you just need it all to move by controlling only one variable, or if you want random objects to be able to hit it and see what sort of reaction it has.

If you just want it to move with one variable, then in Maya you'd use Driven Keys to control it. You group it all together, create a variable for that group, set it up as if one lever is being pushed down, define the variable (which we could simply call "lever") as say... "10"... set the key. Then you would set it at the opposite end, as if the lever was all the way up, then you could set it as "-10" or something... then, as you change this variable, the position of the items in the group adjust accordingly.

It's kinda like making a control for moving multiple items at once. I made an animation of a transformer once, and each part that moved was given a different key... then a key that controlled the keys was made... so I could make it transform by simply adjusting this one variable.
 
Originally posted by: Stiganator
I don't think I need it to respond to stimuli, I just want it all to jive when I move a part.
Click to expand...

Some googling tells me that the closest thing to driven keys in 3dsmax is called the "reactor controller"
 
Thanks for your help Injury, I think I must be overshooting my abilities for the time being. I think there is a Max User group in my city, I'll pose it to them.
 
Put bones in them and give them IK solvers. There's a good tutorial under specialized -> bones & IK

For what you're attempting to do, this should be adequate.

Reactor also has a bunch of constraint solvers you can use - hinge, point-to-point, point-path, etc. These basically put range and rotational limits on the solvers.

 
Originally posted by: Dethfrumbelo
Put bones in them and give them IK solvers. There's a good tutorial under specialized -> bones & IK

For what you're attempting to do, this should be adequate.

Reactor also has a bunch of constraint solvers you can use - hinge, point-to-point, point-path, etc. These basically put range and rotational limits on the solvers.
Click to expand...

That'd probably work well, too, but if you are unfamiliar with adding joints then it could be even tricker to set up correctly.

If you can get this to work right, it's cake once it is working. 🙂
 
Originally posted by: Stiganator
Thanks for your help Injury, I think I must be overshooting my abilities for the time being. I think there is a Max User group in my city, I'll pose it to them.
Click to expand...

Now is the best time to learn something new. 🙂
 
My friends have these complex models I think made with ProE that seem to have the right constraints built in, I thought it would be easier to do with MAX. It makes me sad.
 
you dont really have to use constraints

well.. sortof
constrain the bar that connects to the two using constraints, but when you rotate one have it rotate the other one by the same degree, dont remember what that is called, very fast
 
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