Floating Iceberg Tutorial

[Mr.T]

•:ICEBERG SIMPLE TUTORIAL:•
using Max5.1, by Mr.T

Well first of all excuse me for my poor English. The following method is really simple to use and can be used for many purposes. We are going to use the attachment controller to be able to give the illusion that something (in this case an iceberg) is floating on the sea.

[Mr.T]

Imagine that this plane will be our beautiful sea; we’ll add later a noise modifier to animate this plane as it was water. In this case I made a simple plane with the following settings: length: 350 / witdh: 350 / length-width seg: 10.

[Mr.T]

Now imagine that this chamferbox is a huge iceberg floating on the sea, I know it’s difficult to believe it, just try. Make a simple chamferbox and add a noise modifier on it, play with the parameter until you are satisfied with it (hem..).

[Mr.T]

Well, we have our iceberg and we want it to float on the water (or give the illusion that it’s floating). We are going to attach the iceberg to a face of the plane (sea), then when we’ll animate the plane (sea) the iceberg will give the illusion that it’s floating on it.

Select the iceberg and go to the motion panel, click on position and click on the assign controller button. (the ? )

[Mr.T]

A popup window appears, select Attachment and press OK. The Attachment controller settings now appear.

[Mr.T]

Click the Pick Object button and select the plane (sea), then click on set position and click and maintain pressed the left button on the plane (sea) to place the iceberg at the position you want.

[Mr.T]

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[Mr.T]

Apply a noise modifier to the plane (sea) and play with the settings until you are happy with it. I used these following settings:

[Mr.T]

Test the animation, the iceberg is floating on the sea. If you want the iceberg to be deeper in the sea, click on the iceberg, go in the motion panel and click on Affect Object Only

[Mr.T]

and move the iceberg on the Z axis to put it deeper.

That's it, hope it was easy for you to understand, you can use the Attachment Controller for many other purposes (character's teeth for example).

Important: If you plan to apply a meshmooth modifier on the parent object (in this case the sea) you have to make a reference of it (edit-> clone-> reference) and apply the meshmooth on the reference then hide the original. Why? The Attachment controller works by selecting a face number of an object (the sea in this case), when you apply a meshmooth it multiply the face number resulting the iceberg to move to another place.

[hells angel]

thank u mr T....u just helped me fix a certain lipsynchin problem i had!!...thanks a bunch.