LuckyST Posted April 7, 2009 Share Posted April 7, 2009 I'm helping out a friend who is at art college, and she's trying to make a bunch of small spaghetti type objects "mesh" together. creating this by pure modeling would be a nightmare, so I'm interested if there's some "reactor" trick to make this happen. so far I had no reason to learn reactor, so I'm a noob at that area, but I'm a quick learner. I suppose, it would be done using bones, skin and gravity... but that's about all I can guess about it. any ideas? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TomA Posted April 7, 2009 Share Posted April 7, 2009 I take it you mean animated spaghetti? I'm not sure but you could model it using renderable nurbs curves. There might be scripts out there that would help but that's not a big area of expertise for me i'm afraid. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Claudio Branch Posted April 7, 2009 Share Posted April 7, 2009 Reactor can do it quite easily... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pentexplorer Posted April 9, 2009 Share Posted April 9, 2009 thats nice claudio...it would be great if I can know the steps in how you achieved that spaghetti noodles? Renderable splines instanced through reactor? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LuckyST Posted April 9, 2009 Author Share Posted April 9, 2009 if anybody is going to post some steps, it would be great if they could post it for meshes also (and not only splines). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Claudio Branch Posted April 9, 2009 Share Posted April 9, 2009 Renderable splines instanced through reactor? Yes. Reactor Rope. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Claudio Branch Posted April 9, 2009 Share Posted April 9, 2009 if anybody is going to post some steps, it would be great if they could post it for meshes also (and not only splines). It would be great if you could post up an image of your elusive "meshed-spaghetti"...it will be easier to help that way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LuckyST Posted April 14, 2009 Author Share Posted April 14, 2009 here it is. she wants to have a bunch of these rubbery items fill a bowl (intertwine with each other and stuff). I'm thinking of using "soft body" ... but any other advice would be great! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Claudio Branch Posted April 14, 2009 Share Posted April 14, 2009 (edited) I'm thinking of using "soft body" ... but any other advice would be great! Soft Body + Rigid Body collection will be the way to go. It is really pretty straight forward. Model a bowl and a single "eraser." Add an FFD modifier and a reactor Softbody modifier to the eraser. On the FFD parameters, "Set number of Points" to suit your geometry and set Deform to "Only in Volume." Create a Rigid Body Collection and add the bowl to its list. Create a Soft Body Collection and add the eraser to its list. Go into Reactor and test this setup between the bowl and a single eraser. Bowl mass should be 0 and eraser mass should be at least 1. Run reactor in Preview mode to quickly see what kind of behaviour your getting. Once you are satisfied with the behaviour of a single eraser, then just create copies (not instances) of it and add all of them to the Soft Body Collection. I used 45 erasers to come up with this. Get out there and PLAY with it! Edited April 15, 2009 by Claudio Branch Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LuckyST Posted April 15, 2009 Author Share Posted April 15, 2009 (edited) thanks! you really put an effort, and I really appreciate it. I'm really grateful! do you have any tip on how to make them intertwined? Edited April 15, 2009 by LuckyST Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Claudio Branch Posted April 15, 2009 Share Posted April 15, 2009 That what forums are for... I've got a 15 second animation clip of this almost rendered out as well. I will post up a link when it is done. The behaviour is pretty cool... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LuckyST Posted April 15, 2009 Author Share Posted April 15, 2009 would you happen to know how to make it more chaotic? more like a bunch of wires intertwined? do I set them up in different position before the start of the simulation or something? tnx Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Claudio Branch Posted April 15, 2009 Share Posted April 15, 2009 If you really want them in a tangled mess, then you will need alot more of them and they probably will need to be somewhat longer as well. This means more vertices of geometry, more interactions and therefore more time to calculate the simulation. It can definately be done, but you are going to need a stout machine and patience. I placed all of my eraser objects in an array just above the bowl. So all 45 of them are pretty close to one another taking on the shape collectively of a cylinder. When you start the sim in reactor, they automatically begin falling (if they have a mass value greater than 0). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Claudio Branch Posted April 15, 2009 Share Posted April 15, 2009 Here is the link for the 15 second dynamics sim: http://vimeo.com/4168789 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LuckyST Posted April 15, 2009 Author Share Posted April 15, 2009 (edited) is there a way to apply different properties to different parts of the mesh? here's the rendering of my element. it's a rope through a rubber tube. And they behave differently. also, I have a problem because my elements dont interact properly. 1st my bowl is not hollow, and when I change the properties of it to "concave mesh", it hollow, but objects levitate a few inches above the floor. same thing applies for the elements. they interact with each other in mid air. and here's my object not touching the floor of the bowl. http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/4761/havo9k.jpg Edited April 15, 2009 by LuckyST Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Claudio Branch Posted April 15, 2009 Share Posted April 15, 2009 It might be possible...you have an object made with different materials and so you want each material to have it's own behavior? I believe this would be achieved by creating two separate objects, assigning the properties and then perhaps grouping or linking them. I have an old tutorial that I can refer and see what I can come up with. The objects are probably floating because Reactor doesn't like your FFD settings. This also happened to me. Try lowering the values of your FFD box. Open up the User Reference in Max and dig around...tons of good info is waiting for you there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LuckyST Posted April 19, 2009 Author Share Posted April 19, 2009 it was a reactor settings issue. in the utility menu I lowered the reactor tolerance, and it all worked like a charm. I ended up using 150 objects to simulate it. looks great, but it's cpu intensive Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Claudio Branch Posted April 19, 2009 Share Posted April 19, 2009 Glad to hear that it is working out. Post an image or two if you can when you're done! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LuckyST Posted April 19, 2009 Author Share Posted April 19, 2009 (edited) heres a preview http://img2.imageshack.us/img2/50/preview1i.jpg http://img22.imageshack.us/img22/5697/preview2t.jpg I had to make 2 types of "rubbers" a hi and a low poly one, since the helix around the middle was killing me when manipulating the scene. reactor really is a handy tool. Edited April 19, 2009 by LuckyST Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
danb4026 Posted May 6, 2009 Share Posted May 6, 2009 Claudio, where do you set the Mass for the rigid body? I don't see that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Claudio Branch Posted May 6, 2009 Share Posted May 6, 2009 Under the Reactor Properties tab if you are doing Rigid Body collisions. Soft-bodies collisions require a reactor SoftBody modifier added to each object within the SoftBody collection and their mass is found there. I ran another Reactor sim with a glass object breaking. I used the ProCutter tool which is very useful for quickly breaking up an object into several fragments. Rendered out with Mental Ray and some caustics: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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