Reactor

[Jack]

Ok....

I'm a little new to this all & want to get better w/ max over the summer.

So... a few questions:

1) Do you make your animation in "real-world" scale? Ex: A pen is like 8in long not 100 "units".

2) What do you think of the reactor plug-in? I know Ted mentioned something about it at Nats. Do you think it would be easier if you had say, a wall of bins & a robot which crashes through them to use reactor to animate the bins, or to just do it "by hand"

Thanks

[Soukup]

Reactor=God Smiling upon animators

Reactor is probably the greatest thing to happen to 3ds max ever, it allowed realistic physics simulations with only a couple clicks of the mouse (okay it was a little more then that, but it is darn easy). My advice would be to go through the tutorial book that came with max 5, it will take you about 10 hours, but then you'll be a reactor pro, and you'll wonder how you lived without it. Reactor ROCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AS for a real world scale of a pen being 8 inches, that doesn't matter. You make a real-world scale. Reactor only reacts with the sizes of the object, and just treats every piece as a chuck of geometry. Will you get different effects if the pen is 100 units big as opposed to 50 units big? Possibly, but only if everything else isn't to scale. Meaning if you were to make a robot crashing through a wall of bins, and the robot was as big as the ramp, of course you get different results, then if the robot was regular size. With reactor just keep in mind: Proportion. And you'll be okay. And when you get really good with reactor, you can have some crazy fun with water . You'll see what I'm talking about.

And no matter what, if you are somewhat skilled with reactor, it will always look better and it will be easier and less time-consuming then animating it by hand. Unless your name is reisser from team 103, and you have some sort of ungodly ability to animate everything by hand

Hope that helped.

[Brian Yip]

hi,

I'm from team 114. In our animation, everything in the first two scenes are in real scales, all in metric system. Like for the lab table it's two meters, exactly the same as with the one in the school's lab. Everything in the robot is in real world scale too (again metric, easy to calculate). I made a cross-section of an extrusion using spline. Then I can just use apply extrude and type in whatever the dimension it is. I bet other people use this method too.

Reactor is very useful and it's fun to play with. You don't need to have a standarized unit system, but I prefer you to have one. Things will just get more organized and closer to the real-world.

By the way, don't use multiple unit systems in your animation. It will screw you up. For example, I found a bug in the extrude function where if you change one unit system to another, the numbers you typed in will not be shown as the one you want.

It's fun to play with reactor. Better than any computer games in the world.

[Brian Yip]

oh, don't animate the bins by hand!!!!!!!!
It will take foreverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr and it will not be realistic at all.

hehe, better just spend an hour or two learning how to use it. I guarantee you will get addicted to it.