Please feel free to use this is your animation, but give credit to me in your credits.
-Alexander S. McGee
Metal Muscle 1506
Excellent work! It looks great. I know it is a work in progress and I have one suggestion to make it more accurate: the vision tetras also need to be red and blue respectively (not grey).
Good job. One obvious discrepancy between your image and the rules: the player station wall this year is only 18 feet wide on a 27-foot-wide field. There are four feet of exposed field end on either side of it.
The field is looking pretty good. Here are a few comments/nits to help make it even more accurate:
as noted above, the alliance station wall is only 18 feet wide. In addition, it is made of three identical 6-foot wide sections. Each section has its own 68-inch long shelf to hold the operator interface.
There is no diagonal brace coming off the ends of the alliance station walls at the 45 degree angles. Instead, in the new configuration, there are rounded “hand rails” on each of the wall sections that extend from the floor up about 48 inches. See this image for an example.
The field border is a 2-1/2" x 2-1/2" alumunum angle, with the vertical face in towards the field. It is not a box channel.
The vision tetras are colored red and blue, just like the rest of the tetras. They are not grey.
In between each pair of loading stations in each quadrant of the field, there is a gate in the field railing for access to the field. There is an aluminum diamond plate ramp at this point on the outside of the field border, rising from the carpet to the top of the field border. There is a strip of yellow and black “safety tape” at the top of the ramp. Look at the field overview renderings in Chapter 3 and 4 of the manual, and you will see what I mean.
The automated loading stations are made of 1"x1" aluminum square tube, and have a much more skeletal appearance. See this image and this image for examples.
Good job so far - keep at it!
-dave
I was not aware of this thread. I started a thread on this before i uploaded it.
Anyways, i fixed the tetra problems, and added placeholders.
The loading stations were much less skeletal in the diagrams that i followed in the FIRST documentation.
I used the framework from last year’s field that i made for the foundation of this one. I only fixed the holes in the walls for ball loading area. I did not (yet) modify the field to accommodate this year’s physical attributes that extensively.
Thank you for the suggestions / details that i overlooked. I will try to find time tonight to make all of them and upload it.
Its not as nice as your field Dave! Which, i noticed Mr. Flowers saying that you were using Mac G4(5)'s. Which software did you use to create the animation? Maya, Lightwave, or something else?
Thanks again,
http://grovelandfire.org/metalmuscle/field_01.jpg
http://grovelandfire.org/metalmuscle/field_02.jpg
http://grovelandfire.org/metalmuscle/field_03.jpg
I was having waaayyy too much fun with the camera. Things got a little distorted.
-axe
Make sure that the set of drawings you are using are for the competition field, and not the practice field. The loading stations on the practics field are made of slabs of plywood, and similar in appearance to the ones on your field. You probably want to use the other set of drawings.
I use Lightwave v8 to generate the kick-off animation, with three dual-processor 2GHz Mac G5s for rendering the frames (all 9500 of them, if you include the scenes I had to re-render as the game design changed). I use Lightwave for three reasons:
it is a virtual firewall between me and the animation sub-group on my team. This ensures that they will not be subjected to anyone thinking they have an unfair advantage in the animation competition by having access to the field models that I build for the kick-off animation. My Lightwave models are not compatible with the Autodesk software, so they can’t take advantage of my work or any prior knowledge that I may have. This keeps us ethically “clean” and makes it easy to verify they aren’t breaking any rules.
I don’t do PCs
it’s what I know
-dave
Our team downloaded the file but when we tried to open it, it says that there are missing dll. files and then a box pops up that asks us to choose which dll. to use but no matter which one we pick it won’t open. Can anyone help us?
Which version of 3ds max are you trying to open it with? If it is 7, try reinstalling it. It sounds like it mat be an error in the program to me.
-axe
Just tell it to open. Dont click on anything.
However, it may not run correctlly in 6. It was designed in 7. Give me a few hours, and i will post a version that is fully compatable with 6.
-axe
thanks.
Yes guys, this will not open (yet) in any other version than 3D Studio Max 7, newer versions are not compatible with older ones, but older versions are compatible with newer ones. :]
