CompuServe Messages

Ed, >> Any ideas how to easily realistically animate loads of granules along similar paths at varying speeds, without making things get very complicated in the keyframer. << What's wrong with complexity? It's ambrosia to me. Anyway here's some suggestions which get progressively more complex. You could hierarchically link the granules to a dummy and then at the right time scale up the dummy equally on all 3 axes. This will dissipate the particles outwards from the pivot point of the dummy. It will also scale them too, so you would have to proportionaly scale down the granules to compensate (If you scale the dummy 400%, scale the granule 25%). Do it for one granule then copy tracks from it to all the other granules. Other things to think about: you could animate the dummy along a path during the explosion, if necessary, if you want to make the particles go in a particular direction. You could use the keyscript language that comes with 3ds to create some random variations in the position keys of the granules during the explosion. It's not hard to do. I could post some sample code if you are interested. I did a piano-to-flock-of-birds explosion with this technique recently – it's for a movie called "Virtuosity". Martin