It seems pretty crazy that this sort of animation hasn't been created in Max yet, so I thought I'd ask if maybe I was missing something.
I want to use an object, or make it Seem like an object, is milling material out of a block of some sort, removing material. I don't really care if the material goes anywhere. I just need it to go away.
In the past I've cheated with 2 objects. If all I need is one pass at my "milling" then I can just animate a mask in after effects and get the appearance that section has been milled to the final shape. But I need my cutting tool to touch down to mill a little, then cut a bit more from the same area, then cut a bit more, etc.
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Currently, we're doing our best to animate vertices manually. I'm not sure if you've done that in Max, but the experience is horrifyingly terrible. It seems the only way to do it is using autokey, so it wants to create a key at frame zero for every interaction. But Actually, it seems to randomly choose when it wants to do that. So that way works a little but is basically garbage.
I was looking into vol. select. It has an option on selection method that says it will add to the selection. The help file isn't very good, and makes it seem like will add to it's selection, but that's not true. What it does is add to a selection previously created in a stack. But only once, at it's current frame. It doesn't add to a selection per frame.
So vol. select is really cool if you want to animate a dent moving around. But you can't keep dents going with that.
I Could probably animate a map and use displacement. but that seems overly complicated and too difficult to control.
One other method I thought of was actually using Vol. Select in conjunction with Mesh object. Use a particle system to drop a new object for every frame with zero speed and not inheriting motion. So it just poops out a new sphere for every frame, making a longer and longer volume of objects. Use that as the mesh object to control vol. select. But Really that's only going to get you so far, and I'm pretty sure it would Really choke hard on it after a second or two.
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Clearly I've thought it through, some of the ideas came from searches, but no one seems to have come to a way of doing it.
I'm looking into seeing if I could make the object out of cloth, removing gravity, and seeing if there is a modifier I can limit to an area. Like if I can attach a Tiny Tiny wind to a cutting object, move that through there, then it should just "push" the cloth just outside the wind. I'm not incredibly hopeful with trying that out, but I thought it was worth a go.
these are not tools I usually use, mostly because they seem to never quite work. So I'm not really sure if people use them, or if Autodesk just wanted to say "we have this too" and then people just forget about them and get back to working how they did before the tool existed. (seems likely to me)
Any ideas? Or, should I just say F it, and use a different software? At this point that's cool. I really dislike Max.
