Stretching/Squashing animation?

Stretching/Squashing animation?

Postby irishrailguy » Sun May 24, 2015 1:03 am

Hi,

So I need to animate a cylinder that squashes and stretches, and I know the only way to do this is through skinning and bones. Does anyone know how this can be animated properly and put into the sim successfully? I've done a test cylinder on a 30-frame animation which squashes and stretches as I want in Max, but just remains rigid in the Blueprint Editor.

Any info on doing something like this is appreciated, I know someone out there has done it as a result of the animated characters in the sim!

Kevin
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Re: Stretching/Squashing animation?

Postby eyore » Sun May 24, 2015 9:59 am

I think we need a little more detail as to what you are trying to achieve.

TS 2015 does not support squashing/stretching animation(scaling), as far as I am aware, therefore, I presume you are trying to use flexing to duplicate the action and have skinned a set of bones accordingly?

It's a long time since I did any bone animation but, from memory, two quick points to check - have you used the correct shader for the skin and check your bone naming as it is critical.

p.s. just remembered - have you ticked the check box in the exporter for exporting bones?
Phil

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Re: Stretching/Squashing animation?

Postby irishrailguy » Sun May 24, 2015 1:19 pm

eyore wrote:I think we need a little more detail as to what you are trying to achieve.

Sorry, think it was too late last night to write a coherent question. Basically, I have a wire that I need to animate, but it's connected at one end by a moving object and connected at the other end by a fixed point. So if I was to animate the whole wire, the part at the fixed point would be moving too. In essence, I want to find a way of animating on a vertex-level as opposed to the object-level and I figured the only way this can be done in TS is through skinning.

The animation I'm trying to achieve is outlined in the attached image. To be honest I've never worked properly with bones before so I don't really know how to animate with them in this context. I want to have the top set of vertices move downwards and then back up, while the bottom set remain static. So it's basically a squash animation using skinning (from what I can see). Is this sort of animation possible using skinning? If it is, what needs to be animated for it to work in TS? i.e, do I need to animate the skinned cylinder or do I animate the bones that are associated with the skin? I've applied the SkinDiffuse shader to the cylinder and everything seems to appear ok in game, but no animation plays. I've read up the bone naming convention on one or two forum posts elsewhere that say I should name the root bone Bone_ctrl_node, but no particular naming convention applies to the other children.

In the case of my problem, I'm not sure what bone system would allow stretching and squashing. I've tried using a 2-bone system (one child bone and the 'nub' bone, which I assume is the one which should be called Bone_ctrl_node), but as bones are rigid, it seems like the only way I can achieve the stretch/squash effect would be to create a stretchy bone pair with point helpers and constraints. I've tried this and it doesn't seem to work in TS though.

Anyway, it's a rather convoluted issue so I apologise if this causes any confusion. However I really am lost on how the whole skinned animation aspect of TS works, but if you know how I can achieve the described animation then that'd be of great help.

Thanks,

Kevin
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Re: Stretching/Squashing animation?

Postby eyore » Sun May 24, 2015 4:32 pm

The way I usually do this kind of animation is to have two cylinders, one inside the other, where one is very slightly smaller in radius than the other. The wider one is fixed and the narrower cylinder is animated to slide inside the other, giving an impression of the cylinder shrinking in height

If you watch the video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsqKPafy0ZI you can see the lifting cables on the crane using this technique.

Don't know if that helps?
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Re: Stretching/Squashing animation?

Postby gougha » Mon May 25, 2015 2:23 am

eyore wrote:The way I usually do this kind of animation is to have two cylinders, one inside the other, where one is very slightly smaller in radius than the other. The wider one is fixed and the narrower cylinder is animated to slide inside the other, giving an impression of the cylinder shrinking in height

If you watch the video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsqKPafy0ZI you can see the lifting cables on the crane using this technique.

Don't know if that helps?


Like that eyore. I may be using that technique myself in a little while.

Regards

Andy
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Re: Stretching/Squashing animation?

Postby irishrailguy » Thu May 28, 2015 11:35 am

eyore wrote:The way I usually do this kind of animation is to have two cylinders, one inside the other, where one is very slightly smaller in radius than the other. The wider one is fixed and the narrower cylinder is animated to slide inside the other, giving an impression of the cylinder shrinking in height

If you watch the video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsqKPafy0ZI you can see the lifting cables on the crane using this technique.

Don't know if that helps?

Ah, that sounds like a really simple solution! Don't know why I didn't think of that but it should do the trick alright :D Thanks eyore!

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