Max Reactor

[jonnybefree]

Hi,
i'am trying to animate the strawberry using reactor, simple fall down from the off on top onto the groundplane.
i've try'd it using softbody dynamics, but max crashes everytime calculating the strawberry. i have the strawberry, and a small branch, which have to be attached on it. so now i've switched the strawberry to hardbody, but want the branch to be "elastic". so using softbody.(i've also try'd with a simple flex modifyer, but it want work with reactor, cause he allways calculate from the pivot, wich i can't animate with reactor).
the branch is attached with a hinge constraint, but for using it, the branch have to be included into the hardbody dynamics, and can't included in both, hard and softbody.

here a little visual help:


any ideas?
best regards
Jonas

[jonnybefree]

[Da_elf]

i cant offer help. but i would say that sliiight softbodies on the strawberry would look great especially with some nice slow motion hehe

[jonnybefree]

yes the slow motion - no problem

i've try'd it now, calculated only the SB with reactor (Hardbody), linked the branch on it, and added a flex on it. but it looks more like a frozen or stone-aged strawberry.

[panthon]

Have u considered the possibility of creating a low res strawberry proxy for simulation? It must be accurate enough to work when using the full res model, but apart from that i don´t see any other difficulties...Reactor lets u use a proxy instead of the real geometry under object properties.

[studioDIM]

ditto!

Lele

[jonnybefree]

aaah.
sounds good. it have to be the same mesh optimized?

[Da_elf]

if you model a strawberry with enough mesh to see some nice softbody squishing on the strawberry then isnt there a modifyer to let you use a low res model to drive a high res model. i forget the modifyer name.

[powerandrubber]

Have you tried simcloth? Just a thought.

[jonnybefree]

when i collapse the strawberry, put on an optimize modifyer, collapse again, and use it as proxi? but normaly it has to have the same amount of vertices or?

i can't test it at the moment, but yes, simcloth is another option.

[joconnell]

If you use reactor then you can simply parent your high res fruit to the proxy one and sim with the proxy. Simcloth actually animates the vertices for an object rather than using position and rotation which is a little annoying - if this is a problem I've written a script to track low res to high res objects to get around this.

[Neilg]

when i collapse the strawberry, put on an optimize modifyer, collapse again, and use it as proxi?

Optimise modifiers make your mesh ugly as sin, the faces need to be pretty evenly spaced.

Just get a cube and edit it until its the right shape, should be going for about 1k polys with that, maybe a few more.

Not done this with soft bodies so I dont know how the deforming translates to a high poly mesh, but I would imagine it would work seeing as thats a major part of it rendered useless if it doesnt.

[Morbid Angel]

yes the strawbery as a proxy is indeed a way to go. I would also suggest not to use softbodies, but rather, make a rig of the branch using bones and spline ik, then using reactor rope with quite stiff attributes onto the spline ik. You can the pin the end point of the branch to the strawbery and let it fly. I also suggest setting your frame samples from 10 to 30-50 and rope collection samples around same value. This will produce precision in simulaiton but will slow it down so be careful. With such setup you also dont need a hinge constraint, this makes it a bit simpler.

[DaForce]

Whatever happens you must show us the animation

I think Morbid's idea is pretty good... well worth a shot!

[jonnybefree]

thanks alot for all your tips
i will try it with the proxi, have allready done the setup for it
nice idea with the bone setup morbid.

havn't time today but hope the weekend will bring the light.