How would I go about doing this?

Hello

I posted a topic on CGtalk but only recieved one reply in relation to an effect I wanted to achieve, so I decided to see if you guys could help me.

I currently have a building which is being quickly transformed into a full covered one.

First I have my timber frames falling from the sky, landing on-top of each other (already done this) and I also have the camera circling around it which follows the OSB (the ply wood which covers the frame) to cover it.

I'm trying to get this plywood that covers the outside to be a similar effect to that of the guy who moderates this forum (i believe!)

http://www.tysonibele.com/Main/Animatio ... _style.mov

Notice how the surface folds onto each other to form the new object, well I'm hoping to get a similar effect on my ply wood. Simply it unwrapping as if a big unlimited kit that keeps going until it covers the whole building.

I have no idea how to go about this, and if someone could help me that would be brilliant.

As a side note, if no one can help me and if it's really quite difficult to achieve, I am willing to pay some cash to help me achieve this.

Thank you.

would you have any renders or anim test? for the moment it is quite difficult to imagin what you are tring to archeve without any guidlines to help us helping you.

"the guy who moderates this forum " his name is Tyson, not only he moderates the forum but he is also taking part in the community
so is Cameron the second moderator of the forum.

oh and Btw, nice to meet you and welcome to the comunity, how about a small presentation? as for myself I am richard and acording to franklyn, I may contain nuts

haha ok, thanks for the welcome!

I have rendered it. it's 3mb avi file, which you can find here.
http://www.exsub.com/anim.avi

and in the mean time I'll try and do a mock up version of what I'd like.

Thanks a lot.

Here's a mock up (it's a terrible mock up, cos it's not properly in order and messy, but you get the idea)

http://www.exsub.com/example_anim.avi

Thanks

i have an idea on how to do that using particles, let me try somthing and i will let you know. btw could it be little squares builing up or would you like the have recangle that are the size of a wood board. i'll try somthing will small squares and let you know if my idea works.

If you wish, I can send the actual scene file, and I also have the wall object with cut windows.

I can upload it now. ( infact, I will just to make sure )

EDIT.. here you go. http://www.exsub.com/Scene.zip

Thanks.

P.S. Notice when the camera circels around, thats where the camera follows the tiling being folded on.

first let me try my idea, but you can upload it for others if they wanna try..

I saw something where you can use particles to making something disolve and make itself into dust... you might be able to tweak that so it works for how you want it.

http://www.gnomononline.com/written.php?tutorial_id=41

i did a small particles test, if somthing like that suits you i could enhance it

http://www.richardadenot.com/stuff/test01_.avi

That is just awesome, and exactly what I wanted!!

Thanks so much.

Umm, Is there anyway you could either apply that to my model, or give me a short tutorial on how to go about that to apply it to my playwood on the outside (its included in the scene file I linked)

Thanks again.

well, i won't have time to do it for you, but i could tell you how i did it... what you could do is have them particles running around the hous and as soon as they are the size of a bit of wood, you could hide the particles and unhide the bits of wood. (i hope that makes sence to you) so i'll explain asap because i have been very busy lately.

OK thanks.

*eagerly awaites a tutorial *

That's brilliant, and exactly like I want ...

*waits for the tutorial*

Again, thanks so much for your effort, they are very appreciated!

here you go... if you have any problem whith it, contact me whenever you want

http://www.simplycg.net/viewtopic.php?p=9457#9457

that's brilliant, thanks so much. I'm going to get a crack on it now!

you're welcom, i hope it will help you

Hey xsub! Sorry for the late reply.......I've been extremely busy these last few days, but I'll definitely try to post a bit more info on my Sony spot here in a little while.

Stick around

Hey man,

The sony ad transformations were done 100% manually and all keyframed (probably not the route you want to go).

That being said, I did some Particle Flow scripting this evening and I think I've found a very fast and effective solution for your problem, based on the concepts posted by Richard.

I'll be posting my results later this evening

Ok...fooled around with this all night (it's 2am now! ) and I think I've finally got some reasonable results!

I had to write a Particle Flow Birth Script to get it working properly, but it seems to work fine without any bugs.

Basically, load up the attached .max file and click on the teapot (the teapot, or whatever object you choose to "grow" MUST be selected in order for the script to work!)....then, go into the Particle Flow View, select the birth script operator and load up the script. Once the script window opens, just goto file-->evaluate and it should do the rest (depending on how many polys your object has, it could take a while to do the initial calculations fyi....so be patient!)

You can then adjust the rest of the particle flow settings and or scene elements to change it up how you like. The script right now only supports 1 particle system/object at a time....but that should (in theory) be easily fixed if you want to have several different/separate objects "growing" in your scene (with multiple particle systems) at the same time.

Basically, the script generates a particle at the center of each poly of your object. The particles instance the actual poly face at which they are generated, so that the resulting object with is "grown" should match your original geometry quite closely (unless your face is not planar...at which point it'll be a bit off, but that's rare)

Then, similar to Richard's PFlow setup, the particles are flipped over and then frozen to give the appearance of that growing effect.

Enjoy! Let me know if it works out for ya

Test Animation 1
http://www.tysonibele.com/Main/Scripts/ ... /grow1.mov

Test Animation 2
http://www.tysonibele.com/Main/Scripts/ ... /grow2.mov

Test Animtation 3
http://www.tysonibele.com/Main/Scripts/ ... /grow3.mov

Max File: Attached

***It should be noted that once you create 1 particle system using the script, if you want to create it again using a different object you must FIRST unhide all of the objects with the prefix "face" and DELETE them, as well as the original object from which the particles were instanced. Once you delete those elements from your scene, you can click on a new object, evaluate the script and start the process over. If those objects aren't deleted and you try to evaluate the script again....nothing will happen

Those animations looks brilliant, but I can't say I'm an experienced 3ds max user.. Nevertheless, I'll give it a go.

Thanks a lot for help!

Thanks for attaching file

By the way, I don't have charector studio and it seems as if I need to use it to make it to open it?.. hmm.

Ignore that, I just need biped.dll and I'm now gonna get character studio.

Thanks again, I'll let you know how it goes.

wow thats sweet tyson.. i will have a look at your file and try combining yours and mine...

i really have to learn scripting

Any of you guys got paypal accounts?.. I'm being paid for this job, and I never wrote that script, I don't think I'd be able to in under a month either so you guys deserve it.

Currently my progress is not great.. I have run into errors, not sure exactly why yet, but here's a screenshot.

What happens is, I select the outer ply wood (one object) open up particle view, hit 'edit script' then File>evaluate all.. it finishes instantly, and i click play and it does what you see below.Not only is the plywood out of place when it forms, but it resets it when I click to the first frame again and also same situation when it comes to rendering it.

And here's the scene http://www.exsub.com/One.zip

i personaly don't have paypal, i'll try doing this with tysons scene and yours, and see if it works on my pc...
one thing you could try is to teselate your mesh because i don't think it has enough polygons to work properly.(thats my guess)

Sweet, thanks a lot. Let me know how it goes

Ya I'll give it a shot mate.

Btw...you shouldn't need character studio for this. Just Particle Flow, which comes packaged with any version of max over 6.

Tyson, i had a look and tryed, the only problem is the mesh ok the house... we would need to slice it up a bit to get a nice effect... becae there isn't enough polygons.. tesselating the mesh does not help... you could either write a script to slice the mesh in small cubes of 10 by 10 or you would need to slice it manualy... i could do the slicing in case you can't write that kid of script...

your pflow script is awsome, i tryed changing the events a bit so so rotate and flip a bit more... i'm alsmost there...

edit, nevermind the script tyson i found one online, i'll try tonight and let you know

Just so ya'lls know.....I've been working on the script a bit and managed to optimize it quite a bit.

It's approximately 20-30 times faster, and no longer creates any extra bloaty geometry in the viewports (silly me that I didn't think of how to do that sooner).

Also, less memory leaks/errors etc.

Tried it with your house btw....the new script (which I will post in a bit) works great with it! First I had to manually tesselate (using the cut tool) the geometry a bit but once I did that it's looking really nice.

I'll post my results once I'm done here at work in a couple of hours

By the way....the script I wrote would work in all sorts of situations.

All it does is make all of the individual faces of an object into particles...the rest can be controlled by events in the PFlow system.....so you could use the script in situations like:

-you want some cannon balls to blast through a concrete wall. If the cannon balls were "thrown" at the wall in the form of a particle system, you could use my script to bust open the wall only in the places where the cannons hit it

-object dispersion/dissolving effects in the form of chunks

-fractured explosions

-(in your case) objects growing

etc etc.....pretty cool stuff

that exactly what i wanted to look.. instead of slicing it manualy, i found a script that does it for you.. look on scriptspot (look for slice and you'll find 2 of them that does the trick)

Wow, I cannot thank you enough guys, this is truly a blessing!

I can't wait to load up the new scene

Hey man, I might have to post this tommorow since I'm quite bogged down with work tonight......but we'll see

Ok....well the new script is ready.......I originally anticipated it being MUCH faster, but ran into some bugs that required a solution which slows it down a bit.....but it's still much faster and more memory/scene efficient then before.

Attached to this post is a test animation showing your house growing, the max file of your house growing (you'll have to click the house and evaluate the script in order to re-enable the particles after opening the scene), and the base max file including the grow script (so others can do their own tests).

Let me know if it works for you!

Everything is pretty much the same as before when it comes to running the script (select your grow object then evaluate the script)....a main difference though is that after evaluating the script, in the bottom left corner of the .max UI (or in the maxscript listener if you have that open) a progress dialogue will tell you how far it is through the inital computations (in the form of a fraction...so you can tell how many polys are left to calculate)

so just out of curiosity, what exactly does your script do (just the script not the events)

does it split a mesh in single faces and tell pf to spawn particles from there?

It detaches each face of whatever mesh you choose as separate objects, and then tell PFLow to use those seperated faces as the geometry to instance during the particle simulation. Also, 1 particle is generated at each face of the object, and since each particle is assigned it's respective docking face as its shape instance, the particle system forms the underlying mesh.

Here are 2 more examples of what can be done with the script, simply by adding/changing the particle Flow event triggers (ie...without having to change the actual script)

Thanks so much for this.


Sorry that I have not checked back I've been very busy. I'm going to check out the scenes now.

Is it just me or is the script very slow?. I havea 3ghz computer and it's taking (still going) about 20 minutes to render @ 320x256..

Hmm, maybe I made a mistake..

Crap...I'm tied up rendering atm.....might have to wait until tonight to get to this.