Got A Solution For Animations Using Maxwell Studio

[kjverine]

I figured out a way to do an animation using maxwell studio. Its a tedious process but for those of us who don't work in max primarily here is how to do it.

 

I did a scene that i posted on here sometime back of a pool view. I modeled the building in Archicad and imported my trees etc to Studio to compile my entire scene to render using Studio. So now i am wondering how can i do an animation of a simple fly thru of this scene. First of all you have to know a little bit about using cameras and setting up frames in max. I exported my "Base Model" of the building that i first started with to a .3ds format and imported it into Max. Then I created a camera and set its target pointing at the center of the building. That target point will act as the pivot point at which the camera will rotate around. I selected a dummy from the "Helpers" tab in Max and created the dummy so it can fully enclose the camera or i should say the camera will be centered in the box created by the dummy. Now go to the hiearchy tab, select pivot and then hit the "Affect Pivot Only" button. This brings up another gizmo with a tiny box. Move that pivot point box to the camera's target making sure its centering the target. Now link the camera to the dummy using the link tool which will make the camera the child and the dummy the parent.

 

Now we are ready to animation our fly thru. You can now go and set how many frames you want to render out and select the "autokey" in the animation timeline, rotate the dummy along the "Z Axis" which rotates the camera around its own target. When done rotating to get the fly thru you want, move the timeline slider to the ending frame and that will give you your animated camera in motion around the building.

 

I then went ahead and deleted the model I imported but kept the animation intact. Then i used the tutorial on the think.maxwellrender.com website about animation export in 3ds max. Follow how that tutorial export each frame to a folder. This is important because this is actually exporting jus the cameras for your animation. Once you have exported the MXS files. Open your completed scene that you want to now animate. Import each frame or mxs file that you just exported which will bring in each camera or frame for you to animate. Now here is the hard part:mad: I had to manually take each camera that i imported and set them to the correct Shutter, Fstop, SL, & Time. Then i had to set each camera in my animation as active and then export the scene to another folder. This will now give you your sequence that you can set to animate.

 

 

I know this was long but i hope it make sense for those of us who work using studio but want to do an animation of a simple fly thru. Just to note each final frame that i had to export was 145 meg .mxs so i did them in increments of 15 then deleted when they were done.

 

PM me if you have any questions

[Devin Johnston]

That process will work however if your using 3D Studio anyway why not just use the Maxwell plugin and save your self many hours of tedious work?

[kjverine]

Well i did say this is for those who do not use max primarily and have older scenes that they have completed using studio. I hardly use archicad the plugin because archicad does not do a good job with uvw and importing trees done with onyx, xfrog etc.. are simple to do using studio. Actually i am in the process of learning Max to get around this but i jus did this to see if it was possible.

 

Thanks for the reply maxer:)