Baking animation frames using particles in Max

Lee3dee · Apr 2010

for example,

you have a cube and place a bomb in the center and use a space warp to bind the bomb to the mesh to create a fracture effect. If you wanted to bake the animation frames of the sequence, how would you do this? Been looking for a solution on the webz with little luck, I could animate it also in reactor. Once I have the animation frames baked onto the mesh, I can import it into Hero Engine

Anyone done anything like this?
Thanks
-Lee

Saiainoshi · Apr 2010

For baking animation you would want to open the motion tab in max. Make sure you have trajectories selected. Start time is what frame the animation baking starts on, and end time is the end from of the baked animation. Samples is how many key frames you will have in between the start time and end time. Make sure you have position, rotation, and/or scale selected for what you would like to bake. Once you have everything plugged in. Select the object you want to bake the anims to, setup your sample ranges, then hit collapse.

Lee3dee · Apr 2010

Thanks Saiainoshi, I ran into a problem though. When I unbind the bomb and delete it, it breaks the animation but keeps the frames.

thanks
-Lee

Saiainoshi · Apr 2010

Strange, it should keep the information on the keys after you've baked it. This is ghetto way, but is there anyway you could attach all the pieces to dummy boxes and baked the keys onto those instead? I'm still scratching my head as to why the information isn't getting baked into the animation.

Lee3dee · Apr 2010

thinking its probably simpler to do it in reactor or ray fire than standard max

Saiainoshi · Apr 2010

You're probably right

yiannisk · Apr 2010

ran a quick search and found few things .. maybe you want to give them a try.
cheers!

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If it's a very important explosion you could write (or maybe find) a maxscript that skins (rigid) each expoded mesh chunk to a bone and then you could use an explosion force to drive the bones. You'd have to scope down the number of chunks.

I suppose how you go about this isn't really important. What's important is that it's often possible to use the pre-rendered dynamics simulation stuff in Max and Maya and transfer the motion data to game-engine friendly assets. As holmeren suggests, baking to trajectories is a good option.
_________________
Josh Buck
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=208889

http://hammerbchen.blogspot.com/2007/03/tutorvideobaking-animation-with-bake.html

http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-176492.html

Baking animation frames using particles in Max

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