Animating with reactor

[Stephen Thomas]

Just for fun this one!

 

Trying to animate this model of Newton's cradle using hinge constraint to allow balls to swing. That's the theory anyway, but in preview nothing happens.

 

Balls and wires are attached objects, rigid body pivoted at top. I have given them a mass, everything seems ok but not sure where I am going wrong.

 

Planning to integrate into desktop scene with HDR lighting the chrome balls, should look cool .

 

Any ideas??

 

Okay, figured out I had 'unyielding' checked, misunderstood the meaning. Now my collision detection is giving me headaches, the balls seem to merge into one another and I can't bring the collision tolerance down below 4mm. I'd probably be quicker keyframing this myself, but wanted to try Reactor for a wee experiment!

[Stephen Thomas]

Okay figured out I had 'unyielding' checked. Misunderstood the meaning. Now though my collision detection is giving me headaches. Sometimes the balls seem to merge into each other. I also can't bring the collision tolerance down below 4mm. Anyone done anything similar before??

 

I'd probably be quicker to keyframe it myself, but wanted to try Reactor for a wee experiment.

[Nils Norgren]

It would definitely be faster to keyframe, in my experience reactor is easier if you need some more random animation, but to keep tolerances tight and make something like this could be a challenge. I am no expert, by any means, I did use it to make some crumbling blocks for a projects back in 2006. It works well for messy stuff where all the chaos will cover up the overlapping and penetrating.

 

My 2¢

 

-Nils

 

here is a clip at low res, ( you can see some problems with the sim, but in the movie it goes by quickly and hopefully no one notices)

[Stephen Thomas]

It would definitely be faster to keyframe, in my experience reactor is easier if you need some more random animation, but to keep tolerances tight and make something like this could be a challenge. I am no expert, by any means, I did use it to make some crumbling blocks for a projects back in 2006. It works well for messy stuff where all the chaos will cover up the overlapping and penetrating.

 

My 2¢

 

-Nils

 

here is a clip at low res, ( you can see some problems with the sim, but in the movie it goes by quickly and hopefully no one notices)

 

Nice animation mate! How did you get the new building to 'grow' like that? Very cool.

 

Anyway, I've now just keyframed the whole thing instead, here's a preview and I'll post the final anim in the finished work section once I'm done rendering.

[Nils Norgren]

How did you get the new building to 'grow' like that? Very cool.

 

We used a simple technique where we animated one section of the curtain wall (as an editable mesh with vertex animation) and then used "Mesher" objects, which are similar to instances but have an animation offset. All of the objects in the view are meshers and the main animated piece is way off behind the camera. Using a quick maxscript loop I can offset all the mesher offset times and get the build I am looking for.

 

The newton's cradle seems to be coming along well,

 

Happy animating!

 

-Nils