Hi!
I’ve come here to ramble about some methods of automatic copying and delaying animation in multiple slave objects.
Perhaps I’ll start to script my own “motion graphics” tool for max. All ideas are welcome.
What I want:
- copying & offsetting animation to thousands of slave objects
- quick previewing
- easy modification of the source animation and all offset/delay parameters, preferably in the same object. No baking!
- source animation is keyframe-based for fine tuning curves
- offsetting has a visual controller, like the sphere gizmo, so that animation starts when the gizmo collides with a slave
- offsetting happens in relation to the slaves distance to some object
- the offset/delay can be randomized
I know there are a bunch of great scripts and tools for this kind of work. I’ve tried some, and if you know a similiar tool then please drop a line. I will list some scripts and my experiences below. I’m sure I just haven’t figured out how to work with some of them properly.
** Key Transfer 1.06 by John Martini
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/key-transfer
The “Delay” seems to offset individual keyframes, and not all the slave objects keyframes as a whole. This means that if I’ve animated the scale property and use random offset, all the different x,y,z elements of the scale controller will shift to different position.
Also I haven’t figured out how to disable the automatic “Grouping if between” parameter to achieve smooth delays across thousands of objects.
It is great to have the order by proximity to a dummy object -setting, but controlling the easing through a drop down menu with options (linear, cubic in, cubic out etc) seems a bit clumsy when comparing to a visual controller.
In a test of mine transferring a 10f pos+scale animation to 1500 objects was really slow at the first time, but redoing the transfer was pretty fast.
** La Ola v03 by Daniel Wichterich
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/la-ola
I didn’t actually get far with this script, as it seemed to make the slave tick offset much higher than what was shown in the properties. Also I’m not too keen on controller driven offsetting, as this sometimes creates errors when in example merging scenes. La Ola was also very slow in building the script/expression controllers when I used it with 1500 objects.
** Anim Transfert and Radius influence by Clovis Gay
http://vimeo.com/36235621
http://vimeo.com/36242041
http://vimeo.com/36034895
I have not tested these scripts, but it seems that the anim transfert tool doesn’t have a proximity order function, and the radius influence tool doesn’t allow precise curve-based keyframe animation for the source.
** Key Shifter 1.2 by Sugi Iggy (?)
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/keyshifter1-22
http://members.jcom.home.ne.jp/jobs/maxscript/sKeyShifter1.2.mse
I couldn’t find the version 1.22.
This script requires that all the slave objects have the animation on them before offsetting. Also I couldn’t find a way to offset them with a distance to a dummy -order, you just choose the direction for the offset to happen.
If I’m to script a new tool by myself (with very limited experience), I’d maybe go with a keyframe based tool. Maybe the script would preserve a list of all the slave objects, and their offset information, so that these values could be easily modified. Do you have any thoughts, suggestions, ramblings etc?
Thanks in advance,
- Ebee
- edit #1:
Quick idea from Bercon:
How about using PFlow for the animation?
Of course I have to figure out how this works with custom slave objects, that have varying meshes and predefined positions on the scene.