Cineversity

Hi Dr Sassi,

I am trying to export out a scene to 3DS Max to my friend.

I have a simple Sweep NURB animation, done with a profile spline and a circle, which I am animating the growth.

But somehow when I am exporting using ,fbx or .3ds from Cinema it is getting turned into static polygon objects without animation.

Is there a way to bake this ?

Thanks !

Hi Raj,

Never touched 3DS MAX, so I can’t tell what options are there.

Sorry, I had hope that someone had an idea.

All best

Sassi

Hi Dr Sassi,

I was just wondering if I have to export out a sweep NURB animation, to .fbx what would be the best way to go about. I have tried Cappuccino and also a plugin called SteadyBake. But no luck. When I export out .fbx, I cannot create a cached PLA folder.

Raj

Hi Raj,

When you set the Display mode in C4D to anything with lines, you might notice that the Sweep NURBS create new geometry while animating the “growth”. PLA animation won’t help here, as it doesn’t support points that appear over time, especially not the geometry created on such.

Thinking about the output, have you considered Object Sequences? (http://skinprops.com/download.php?list.9) Keith Young is a well known developer for this plug in alone. Please make certain 3DS has the option to load object sequences in, with no support or guarantee I would guess that this plug in would do the trick. Well I do not have 3DS MAX, so I can’t test this: http://andye.myweb.hinet.net/maxscript_1.html

(In C4D you can create Object sequence animations easily in MoGraph)

Good luck

Sassi

Instead of a SweepNURB you could use a SplineWrap deformer instead.
I.e. a Cylinder Object SplineWrapped along your spline.
The point count will then be constant and you can get PLA out of it
with the PLAmate.

Cheers
Lennart

It would be nice to know what kind of result needs to be achieved, perhaps that would give some ideas for other options. General questions have the potential to allow for too much variety, and with that, limit the chance to find an alternative. ;o)

Thanks a lot for your suggestions Lennart and Dr Sassi.

My animation is a really simple one. Wires growing out of speakers. I have also thought of putting them inside a step effector and offsetting the time, to achieve a more staggered growth pattern on the splines.

Hey Raj,

IF these are wires, you might think about a growing effect based on an animated gradient in the Alpha channel. If these wires are thin, that might work and is certainly a technique that you can set up in most 3D applications.

As a side note, the workflow question might be always, if the animation is already set up in C4D, is there a need to continue in 3D, or render all parts based on a shared camera-information and compose the results. In the past eight+ years I have seen a more and more stronger tendency to move things into compositing, instead of trying to solve everything in alone. WEll, it is always a question of what works and how the team-skill-level is.

All the best

Sassi

Hi Dr Sassi,

Thanks for the input on the alpha channel animation. The thing is that we are trying out something for Augmented Reality, and we need to give it to the developer for Unity in .3ds max file for some reason. Along with the splines I have some mograph animation which I have successfully baked for export. Hence all this baking problems !

hey Raj,

I’m not in that Game world at home, even I think it is an amazing field. Have you checked out the Unity training here, perhaps that would help to get the files—perhaps—directly to Unity, instead of doing the extra steps with 3DS. Again, no idea what is possible there. Perhaps you check with the support of the Unity developers… just a thought. Since I lead an Architectural CAD-team 20 years ago, I wish I would have gotten for each wrong information a Dollar, that people had and blocked a better developement with this misinformation.
I would suggest to get first hand information what is possible, and avoid any extra conversions. Just my two cents.

Best

Sassi