i’ve tried particle flow with several different techniques. I’ve set up a grid of planes using a free plugin ObjectPostition Plus from
I’ve set up Collision spawns to start the animation with multiple collision objects/gizmos. I like this method best because i can control where the action is happening. But I am totally open to new ideas.
I’ve also used reactor to no avail. i can get the wind to rotate a collection of panels but it doesn’t have the natural look of the video above.
The underlying movement looks a lot like a cloth sim, or even fluids. If it were me I would try to get a sim with one of those to to look close to the right motion and then try to drive particles off of that.
I would go the scripting route. I am no maxscripter but i do have bobo’s cg-academy dvd and he uses a bunch different techniques to shift around animated objects. Seems to me that you could animate one and then use controlled randomness to shift the keys within an array.
You might want to pop over to cgtalk and ask bobo for some help. Or email him direct.
…funny stuff. i am working on a children’s hospital right now. we are in the process of contacting Ned Kahn about doing an installation along the roof line. the piece shows up in the image i am working on right now. luckily, this is a static image, so i used a displacement map, to create waves, and a custom large grided map to give it texture.
i am looking forward to see what you wind up with in the end.
how close is you animation going to be to the screen?
…maybe look at some water generation plug-ins as a possible solution to creating wind waves, and a com,ples texture map applied to the surface. if you don’t need to be close to the object, that might work. i think there was a free one posted not to long ago.
Seems to best fit the thing. You basically prepare an animated bitmap series with a compositing tool or whatever and then drive the geometry grid with this per script. Somewhere in the thread above should be a link to the solution I think
Displacement works with limited results. it looks ok from a distance but is too obvious from close up. We will animate a camera past the installation and probably come well within 10ft of the flappers. they need to actually rotate.
My coworker/manager is actually the man working on it. he had some success with a rigged setup using lookat controllers linked to dummies controlled by displacement.
that worked for a grid of 100 flappers. our installation will have roughly 50,000 squares.
yes, scripting is the answer. Our scripter guy is busy busy.
@dimo - yes, the pinwall needle route has obvious connections. I can see how to set up one flapper this way but no easy way to do mass quantities.
@cmg - i have a feeling that we will end up renering a lot more of Ned’s work into our projects. The client loves it, the designers and architects love it… I love it! Yes I have the waves plugin from http://charles.hollemeersch.net It is very cool but looks too much like water and not enough like wind. If we end up going the displacement route, we will give it a fair shot though.
@dellis - bobo is the man! and maybe a last resort, as i’m sure he is a busy guy. Plus, I barely speak his language (MaxScript)!
@RErender - Clothsim looks like a good path too if we can transfer the deformation to rotation en mass. If we can achieve that, we could use many methods; displacement, noise/wave modifiers or spacewarps… that would really open things up.
@Dynedain - again, it’s the displacement to rotation connection that we’re stumped on.
Thanks all, I’ll keep you posted. My coworker is working with Reator all weekend and should have some interesting results/conclusions come Monday!
We explored the displacement option a bit and will use it for the long shots. my coworker had good success with reactor on a small batch. The flappers look so much better this way because they actually rotate instead of stretch.
Overall we’re satisfied for this go around. I’ll post this topic again on CG Talk and see if i can lure someone (bobo) into a script that reads the greyscale value of a bitmap and links it to the rotation of the flapper.
BTW, Brian, (coworker guy) had beautiful results with a smoke map in one of the slots on the wave map. a mesmerizing result.
Anyone have a clue on the bitmap to rotation angle?
To follow up, we managed to get good results with displacement for the long shots and reactor for the closeups.
I did post on CGSociety under App. Specific > 3dsMax > Scripting. Bobo soved it with a script operator that reads the texel info of any image (or ifl) and rotates the particle ± 30deg. Very nice. He posted the Max 7 file if anyone is interested.
