Animated splines from Max over to Vantage

[fredrik_stre]

Hi

I m trying to animate cables using splines. The cable is connected to a moving object and in Max this is animated with the Spline IK Control. The export to Vantage (With the .vrscene export) just give a static first frame for the spline. I have tried to use the motion Paths Conversion Tool in Max to create keyframes for the splines movement, but no results in Vantage. I have even copied the spline to a mesh object and use SkinWrap to make the spline control the mesh, but no luck. I tried to find some kind of Bake animation for the spline, but nothing works when exported to Vantage.

Yes, I know I can render the scene through Vantage, directly from Max and as such make a render sequence (Then it is no problem), but I really like to use the Vantage as a real time tool for meetings where I can show the animation while using the Collision and Free Tool to see the animation while walking around its components. It works great with IK solvers on mesh objects, but the spline will not participate. I do understand that Vantage don't like to show animation of splines and spline controllers, but it must be a way to convert the ready made Spline animation in Max into a Mesh snapshots for each frame kind of animation?

As such this could be a Max question, but someone must have been thinking about this before, I hope?

[Alexander.Atanasov]

Hi fredrik_stre,

Currently Vantage only supports transform deformations(move, rotate, scale) from vrscenes. But the spline mesh is exported as a vertex deformation which is not currently supported. This is something that we will add in the future but bear in mind that it may not be playbacked in real-time as we will need to cache the geometry for every frame of the animation which will require additional resources, especially if the mesh is heavy on polygons. The only way to render such deformations is through Live Link and and using the 'Render animation using Chaos Vantage', as you already mentioned.

Best regards,
Alexander

[fredrik_stre]

Ok, Thank you! I expected so, but it is good to know it can be part of the vantage future!
By the way, do you don't if there is away to convert a spline (vertex deformation) into frame based mesh deformation in 3DSmax. This way I can animate the cable as spline, but before exporting it to Vantage convert the spline into a animated mesh. Then I can use the real time part of Vantage for our clients!?

Br