3Ds Max - Animation/Rigging advice/problem solvers?

ReD-SpideR

I am working on something to put up on Sketchfab, I need to figure out a way to get the same effect I have by moving the UV tile coordinates up a shaped mesh, but physically so that I can export it for Sketchfab.

What it looks like:

My current Idea is to make a copy of the Auras mesh (reference object), and have it conform to the objects shape, so that when i drag the overlaying mesh with the static UVs, it will appear the same as me just changing the UV coordinates.

So my question to you animators is, how do I have a conforming mesh to another that will just keep pulling inwards towards the reference shaped object.

I tried the conform modifier, but it just conforms once, then when i move the mesh up, it just stays to the last conformed shape, it doesnt recalculate.

Any ideas how to do this? I know there is a way, I've just started dipping into rigging and such so Im a lil unsure what direction to take.

Hito

a morph target/blendshape animation could work, not sure if sketchfab supports that. You could try skinned mesh and surface constraint the bones to the ref object... well, maybe not. Surface Contraint doesn't work on poly objects. easiest way is probably rigging the FX ribbon with 3 bones and scale them to approximate the surface curvature as you move the whole setup up.

interesting problem...

looks like a flipbook texture could work... maybe. not sure if it's implemented yet.
https://help.sketchfab.com/hc/en-us/articles/202600873-Textures-Materials-Formats
down in the comments

clockworxdesign September 10, 2015 09:14
Hi James, could i use animated textures in future? say upload a small gif for a blinking eye , or a short looping video clip to play on a TV on an exhibition stand or similar?
James September 14, 2015 16:05
@clockworxdesign - Yes, it's something we're experimenting with.

Mark Dygert

Can't you just animate the UV's?

ReD-SpideR

Mark Dygert said:

Can't you just animate the UV's?

The uv's are animated, but unfortunely SketchFab does not support animated UV's. trying to find a way around it by making some sort of pyshical change with a static UV. Such a bummer! lol

Mark Dygert

That. Blows. 

It's one of the oldest tricks in the book for a lot of things. Come on sketchFab, you're one of the cool kids.

/wags fist

Eric Chadwick

Is the animation intended to be that fast in the finished piece? I see 5 poses.

If confined to bone anims only, I would suggest making a short cylinder (height of the electric texture band), weighting the top vertices to one bone and the bottom verts to another bone. Then just scale the two bones in/out and move them upwards.

First keyframe is the bottom bone scaled 0%, the top bone scaled 50%. Middle keys are both bones +/- 80% scale. Final key is top bone 0% scale, bottom bone 30% scale. 

Make sense?

ReD-SpideR

Eric Chadwick said:

Is the animation intended to be that fast in the finished piece? I see 5 poses.

If confined to bone anims only, I would suggest making a short cylinder (height of the electric texture band), weighting the top vertices to one bone and the bottom verts to another bone. Then just scale the two bones in/out and move them upwards.

First keyframe is the bottom bone scaled 0%, the top bone scaled 50%. Middle keys are both bones +/- 80% scale. Final key is top bone 0% scale, bottom bone 30% scale. 

Make sense?

The gif is really fast, its about 180 frames and i rendered it out to skip 3 frames for sake of file sizes. And then I must repeat what i learn here to another set of Aura FX's.

I think I understand what you are saying.. hmm.. I will give the rigging it to a bone a test soon.. in the meantime, if i were to just have the static UV assigned to like you said a cilinder, could I have the 'band' of the effect conform to the orignal auras mesh shape? Would it just be some sort of surface contraint/conform.

Moving the band up pyshicaly is what i would like to do, but i also would like it to flow up the orignal meshes shape/faces.

Hito

if the base shape changes through the animation, you probably have to just key the FX ribbon as a second pass to match the way the base shape change. There're many ways of doing this easily in max or maya or whatever, problem is Sketchfab doesn't support 90% of them. The only way to do it such that it's compatible with Sketchfab currently is skinned mesh. Flipbook/animated GIF/Video texture is worth a try, though they don't specify whether it's supported or not.