How to animate a growing building?

[HawkPoint3D]

I am not looking for a step by step how-to.....unless you offer it up of course...hehe

I am wondering the process for taking a model and doing an Animation of it being built in sections...say off of a floor plan. I know it is done often, I have seen excellent examples here on this site, including demolition! Can anyone help with the workflow and thought progression?

 

Thanks!

Dave

[Dave Buckley]

Try animating a Slice plane on each object, but i think that you will find that most of the animations are done using plugins such as digimation grow, although not sure if that one is still around.

 

but anyway give the slice modifier ago and then animate the gizmo (sub-object of slice modifier) going up the object

[Tay othman]

This is a Very Good Topic

 

A Growing building is made by an animated tiles?and sugesions for a plugins?

I'm Making it manually in maya

[Matt Sugden]

Hi, I've been through all this a few times now. there's several tricks to add to your arsenal for construction (and demolition) animations.

 

Visibility Tracks being one of the most useful, the easiest way to do this, it to switch on 'Auto key', and use the visibility tick box in the objects properties, for a simple on and off (visible/invisible), is to set at the appropriate point in the animation, then you need to set a key frame for 'off' property, then move to the frame you want the object visible and change the property to 'on'. A common pitfall for this method is that when you do this, max automatically creates a key frame at the beginning of the animation, which is usually an 'on' visibility key frame, which you have to delete, otherwise you object is visible from the start of the animation then fades away slowly. Try it you'll see what I mean.

 

There's other ways to use the visibility track, (fine tuning in curve editor) I find setting it in the properties dialogue box by far the quickest and simplest for setting it up.

 

As someone already mentioned, their is the slice modifier which you can animate. and it is often useful to cap it so it seems more solid as it grows out of the ground.

 

Of course there is the option to actually move and animate the geometry itself, verts, lines etc if you need to do some fine tweaking.

 

You can also use particle effects, to good effect. Reactor is useful, and you can create some nice reverse explosion and fracture effects.

 

Often it's worth taking a bit of time before you model, to think about how all the pieces are going to fit together. As it's not the same process as just plain old simple modeling, as you probably need more model objects and components to have control over the animation. The other thing to consider, if you're using vray, that you can forget about pre-calcing it, at least in my experience I have to do everything brute force.

 

If you have any question let me know, as I've had to do a lot of this stuff in some detail.

Edited July 11, 2008 by Bewdy

[Spooner04]

If using vray you just need to use prepass for pre-calc instead of multiframe incremental.

Another tip is that if you have alot of repetitive objects(i.e. a column grid) you can animate one. Clone it as a copy, and slide the keys 5 or 10 frames in the timeline. That way you don't have 20 pieces all turning on or moving exactly at the same time. And, it will save you the trouble of animating each individual piece.

[Chris Potts]

Would be greatful if someone create put up here with step by step tutorial pdf. Because I can't find somewhere right one tutorial website like this.

 

Something like start simple basic to learn for us start up how to animate growing building.

 

That would be cool. I would like try new learn experment on it with 3D max.

[xrowdac]

alternative plugin any ideas?

[Peter M. Gruhn]

There's a bunch of tutorial vids on the Area that I found worth wading through. I think a keyword is "reveal". I'll have a quick look...

 

OK, glad I went looking. It wouldn't have been fair of me to expect you to find it.

 

http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/louis/reveal_techniques_and_autodesk_university_in_las_vegas

[dagget20]

that tutorial from louis marcoux really covers pretty all reaveal techniques . I recommend it too

[conrad8]

muchos gracias, hombre

[Peter M. Gruhn]

I can't remember if he covered a solution using morpher. If not, there is some potential there too.

[dagget20]

Actually he talk about: mask,booleans,lofts,reactor,particles and maxscript. But yeah, morph its another good option. I believe that with all this techniques we have some tools to work with.