How to turn animation object to exploded polygons that moving?

[Waseem_Dabbas]

Hi,

I'm not very familiar with animation, but I have this question:

I have a curtain which it moves by wind, I bake the animation into keys, what I want now to explode all its polygons and have them move like "rotate" and "move", in another word, I want to convert vertices animation into objects animation. is there any way I can do that?

[10DSpace]

Hi @Waseem_Dabbas 

Based on your post, you want the individual polygons of the curtain to behave independently at some point in the animation.   

So, I would suggest you make a copy of the curtain and in that separate copy of the curtain detach all of the polygons to make them independent objects so that you can animate each as you like (subobject animation would not work because the polygons are still attached to each other).   To create the illusion of a continuous effect, you could then render the animation of the curtain blowing in the wind until the frame in which you want the curtain's polygons to fly apart.  Then you would hide the original curtain and replace it with the collection of detached polygons you created and then animate these individual polygons from there and render that separately.   

You could also create a visibility track and make the original curtain visible until the frame you want to change to the multipoly-object version and then hide the original and make the multipoly-object version visible.

Also, there is a useful script written by one of the forum experts here, @miledrizk , to automatically detach all of the polygons for you.   The link is here:  http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/batch-detach-selected-polygons

Hope this helps.

[Waseem_Dabbas]

Thank you very much for the answer.

Actually i have to be sorry because i couldn't describe my question very well

I want to convert the animation of the curtain from vertix animation to objects animation

I have lumion program that i want to export to, it doesn't support vertix animation, but it support only move, rotate and scale, so i was thinking what if i divide that curtain into pieces and let every polygon move and rotate by it self? Hope i explain it right.

[10DSpace]

@Waseem_Dabbas 

OK, thanks for clarifying.  You have done a cloth simulation on the curtain and Lumion does not support vertex animation or import of point cache data.    So you want to break up the curtain into individual pieces/polygons and animate them (using just move,scale and transform) to replicate the cloth simulation of the curtain, right?  

Sorry, but as far as I know there is no automatic method to convert vertex animation to an animated translation of it's indvidual objects;  I do not know a way of doing this other than the incredibly tedious process of manually matching polygon for polygon frame by frame throughout the animation.  But even if you could finish that with your sanity intact,  you would not have a smoothed result with the individual polygons.  (The whole curtain benefits from smoothing groups which cannot be applied across separate objects.)     

The only other thought I have is if you are simply incorporating the movement of the curtain into a larger scene in Lumion, you could just render out the curtain cloth simulation from max with an alpha channel and map that to a plane in the Lumion scene.  (Assuming of course that Lumion lets you import and map image sequences to objects.)  It would be a cheat and certainly  not as convincing as the real thing but if the curtain is far enough back in the scene and with some manipulation of the lighting, it might work OK for your purposes.  

Sorry, but that is all I can think of.  Maybe someone else here has a better method.

[Waseem_Dabbas]

Thank you for your patience and for giving me this long answer.

Well, I thought about your trick, it could be useful if I have 1 or 2 cameras, but in fact, I need it like tens depending on how many scenes...

I saw a method which is pretty good but it makes heavy scene, by using snapshot tool, copy curtain as much as total frames number, then hide them for example below Z-Axis, and let each one jumping up frame by frame, there is a script which can do this automatically but the problem is file size will be so huge.

This image describes it for a horse moving example

Animation start from here

https://youtu.be/IsAYdrMmEHM?t=859

I hope you get the idea.

However, I will keep looking for another solution.

Thank you again.