Reactor and meshbomb?

[Curtis Martin]

I am working on an animation that has a character falling thru a glass ceiling and landing on a floor in SLOW MOTION. I want a solid piece of glass to shatter and land with the character. I thought of using Meshbomb in the beginning and reactor at the bottom when the shards are near the floor...to make it realistic. The first time i tried it it crashed my computer. I suspect that meshbomb and reactor controller didnt like each other Does anyone have any other ideas as to how I can make this more efficient/realistic/? PLEASE HELP O' GREAT ANIMATION GRAND MASTERS!!

[Curtis Martin]

I am using max 7.1 btw

[Curtis Martin]

Where Are Thou Masters To Help?????

[MaggieQue]

Take a look the tutorial file <Exploding and Fragmenting an Object>, it may helps.
The tutorial sample file is here: 3dsmax7\tutorials\Film and Video\particle_effects

Another method about "Exploding in reactor", it's called "Fracture". But u have to do "Pre-facturing", glue all the small pieces together to create the whole object. So the process is:

Prepare objects: A piece of glass (Glass A), many small pieces of glass "glued" together (Glasses B), ur character.

When the character breaks the Glass A, turn Glass A invisible, then show off Glass B, Glass B start exploding. Glass B automatically reacting with other rigid body/soft body.


I'm not good at reactor. Just wish it helps.

[MaggieQue]

This is called "Glued glasses".

[MaggieQue]

And this is the animation.

U can see a piece of red glass goes into the red spline, actually it's animated by me after frame 33. Total animation is 100 frame before shrinking file.

The glasses at the top haven't fall down, because they are all "Fractured" in reactor.

[MaggieQue]

Question: Then how to animate object visibility?

Just right click the object, choose Properties, under "Rendering Control" group, adjusting the value of Visibility before pressing the Auto Key button.

[Freespace-3DT]

MaggieQue this is a great example of how useful reactor can be...
There is an alternate solution to this, though and here it is: ( just for the sake of having an option to choose and if you really don't want to use reactor )
You have the initial glass, and make a particle array, have it select the glass as emitter and load the Blast emitter. For particle start and end simply put the frame when the glass breaks. At that frame, make the initial glass invisible, and have a Particle Force like gravity to pull down the particles. Make the floor a Deflector and warp link it to the particles, also, but this will slow down the viewport animation considerably, make a UDeflector ( i think this is the one ) |object deflector| and select your character as deflector, then warp link it to the glass particles. This way, the glass shards will bounce and collide off your character. Hope this helps...

[Curtis Martin]

Thank you both for your ideas. I guess Meshbomb and reator dont mix. I will use reactor and then figure out a way to slow the animation down

[Freespace-3DT]

to slow down an animation simply select a much higher frame rate, like 90, when rendering your animation... this way you will have three times the number of frames, then when you set your avi or whatever codec to have 30 frames per second, it will be three times slower!