To Grow or not to Grow

[Kreation]

Hello all;

I have been asked to do a Growing building; i.e. a brick by brick progression animation type of thing.Up until yesterday I didnt even have a name to refer to it.A member pointed me to a plugin called GROW and I was wondering has anyone used it?

I was also wondering if anyone has any links to animations of this type; with the project appearing before your eyes.Or other plugns that might help speed things up

[Ernest Burden III]

Over the years I've seen that done over and over and over. There was a very good example in the '04 3D Awards, but this year's 3D Awards had probably the best example of the technique I've ever seen:

 

Watch the 'Uniform" piece

http://www.cgarchitect.com/3dawards/

[BrianKitts]

right now I'm doing one where I'm just using the slice modifier and visibility tracks. Since you can animate the slice plane in conjunction with the modifier for caping the ends @ the cut, it makes it really easy to animate objects "growing" and its all built right in to max.

 

I have it timed out so the columns rise up and a speed matching the floor plates as they appear and then the curtainwall goes up, and the glass fades in. Its simple but that was the nice part..... it's simple!

[tecton3d]

Watch the 'Uniform" piece

http://www.cgarchitect.com/3dawards/

 

that's a great piece... I wonder if they used this method? turn the emitters axes and adjust a few params...

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=369928

 

note to self... learn PFlow

[jvlive]

hey thanks for the link daron! very interesting. Ive been wanting to learn pflow as well but what stops me is that it hogs memory. graphic card or ram issue i dont know. your link above is just a simple wall, but once you animate it, it slows down. a few months ago i tried this fireworks tutorial i stumbled upon on the web, and max just crashes on the initial spawner...

[Rendermedia]

I have used Grow from Digimation on a few projects, it works best on simple geometric objects, it gets a bit more messy on more organic type surfaces, its dirt cheap, and companies like redvision used it loads creating old civilisations for the BBC like "Son of God" the trick is to select a buntch of objects and then apply the modifier animate the movement over 2 keys and then go select the various objects you want to grow at diferent stages and odffset the keys in the timeline,

 

Hope that helps

[thatch]

Check out http://www.time-in-motion.com/ the maxscript>animation> keyOffset script from Paul Hormis might help you out, i have done the effect using an animated tile instanced to a particle that is set to birth from the centre of a poly face, then activated by a deflector passing over, you will need this modified operator http://www.orbaz.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=43