an easy way to work with chains / ammo. belts in 3ds max?

NBLM

Hello, max gives me headaches atm.

I want to make an ammo. belt from this box(picture) to the gun(not in picture), but this is not easy. I tried it with the spacing tool and a spline,
but whenever I want to change something on the spline, it does not affect the chain links and I need to delete them and redo everything to see the change.


Is there a better way to do this, maybe something that lets you work on a chain in realtime ? Or is it better to do it completely manual?


thx

Hang10

I don't have Max with me right now but try Loft. I belive it is under Compound Objects in the create tab.

If I remember correctly it works like the Sweep modifier but you can use custom shapes.

NBLM

yeah loft is cool, but it is sometimes really weird to use, it always tends to mess up my shape.
But for this I cant use it because I have chain links.

I've done it now with IKspline.
thx

Mark Dygert

You can also create a path spline where you want the object to deform, then apply pathdeform(WSM) modifer to your ammo belt/chains and target the path spline. You can adjust the path spline after the fact and it will deform the object.

Personally I like to pathdeform an instance of my object so I can still work on a copy of it while its flat and the instance that is deformed will be updated.

marks

PathDefom is the method I use - I find it can be a bit finicky to use in some situations though. Definitely still saves loads of time over doing it by hand though.

9Fingers

If you need to be able to animate the ammo belt - build the model so that it's laid out straight > skinwrap it to a simple plane that has a segment at the join of each round in the belt > skin each end of the plane to a point helper that you can link to the gun or anything else you want to attach an end of the belt to > add a cloth modifier to the plane, adjust cloth settings as needed and add a preserve group under the cloth so that each end of the belt continues to follow the points they are skinned to rather than the cloth > if you need to bake the animation you can do so using a point cache modifier.

Mark Dygert

9Fingers wrote: »

If you need to be able to animate the ammo belt - build the model so that it's laid out straight > skinwrap it to a simple plane that has a segment at the join of each round in the belt > skin each end of the plane to a point helper that you can link to the gun or anything else you want to attach an end of the belt to > add a cloth modifier to the plane, adjust cloth settings as needed and add a preserve group under the cloth so that each end of the belt continues to follow the points they are skinned to rather than the cloth > if you need to bake the animation you can do so using a point cache modifier.

That is a good solution, although I haven't done point cache except on bones, I've only done point cache to bake vertex animation and I think that comes out at a key per frame which could be hard to work with even with reducing keys.

But the rest of the solution is I have used myself a few times.

One extra step you might want to do so you can get everything in and out of a root pose (cloth sims and physics don't always return to a default root pose) is to skin the ammo belt to another separate set of dummies and then snap, align and key the ammo belt to the cloth sim (preferably using Jim Jagger's Animated align script). That way you can capture the cloth sim easily using the script and hand animate the ammo belt when needed, to fix the cloth sim if it fubars or to get it back in a root pose.

Also you don't need to use cloth to get secondary motion, there are other modifiers that might work better like flex, or maybe a spring controller on a bone. Those are fast ways to get secondary motion that actually will return to the default pose, without having to worry about it being twisted up or colliding with itself.

You can also look into jiggle bones or spring controllers that might be available in the engine, UDK Source and I think even Unity have some basic physical controls for bones and meshes.