How do you animate grass and wheels?

harsh · February 2, 2005, 6:47pm

When using 3DS MAX, how do you create grass, and make wheels move during animation. We have managed to make the robot move, but the wheels just slide. Also, we were wondering how to rotate motors on the wheels.

rowe · February 3, 2005, 12:17am

To animate the wheels, you should make sure the pivot point is in the middle. Select the 3rd or 4th tab on your right control panel (forgive me if I’m wrong, I’m working from memory). Click the “affect pivot only” button and then click the “center pivot to object,” taht should align it. Then animate the wheel by rotating and using keyframes (the same way you animated the robot, only with the rotate tool instead of the move tool). The grass will be harder, I’ve never tried so i don’t have an easy solution. I can try to set you in the right direction though, unless its going to be up close, use a texture instead of modeling.

system · February 3, 2005, 1:02am

the easiest way to create grass would be with the hairfx plugin

rowe · February 6, 2005, 10:42pm

Unfortunately, most teams don’t have $600 to spend for a plug-in. I still haven’t thought of a way to do this, but I’d be interested if anyone has an easy solution to do this.

MConte05 · February 6, 2005, 11:39pm

http://67.15.36.49/ffa/tutorials/max/grass/grass1.asp

A tutorial that is specifically geared towards animating grass in 3dsmax.

Hope it helps.

Doug_G · February 7, 2005, 3:11pm

You can make the grass as mesh objects and then use an animated wave deformation to animate the waving grass… for rotating wheel i would actually suggest using a float expression assigned as the rotation motion controller and typing an expression… read up on how to do that…

Tristan116 · February 7, 2005, 11:04pm

There is a great free hair plugin called Ornatrix. It just went public, but you can still get the “beta” version http://www.ibmr.net/Ornatrix/

Anyways, it’s great for grass too. It’s pretty easy to figure out as well. Great forum on their site for questions and the such.

Here is what i did as a test using this plug in a while ago.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=2921&stc=1

Well, Enjoy.

Salik_Syed · February 10, 2005, 11:59pm

DANG tristan that is impressive… more the plugins fault but still that is very nice … 116 aniamtions are always of very high caliber… but u didn’t submit one last year right?

Tristan116 · February 12, 2005, 9:50am

We did, it was quite the cool.
http://web.mit.edu/~levpopov/Public/116_AVA2004.mov
Enjoy.
:ahh:

SteveC116 · February 12, 2005, 9:55am

Thanks for the compliment Salik!