Rotation Controller

[photodave]

OK hopefully I can explain this, I'm working on a very troublesome scene that if you can imagine a drill bit spinning at say 60 revolutions per minute and at random intervals have it stop for 10 or 15 frames and then continue spinning like its getting randomly stuck while drilling.

Here is my problem I'm running in to, when I try to stop the bit and restart, it spins backwards at times with using scripts and trackview. No matter what I do other than baking the animation on a per-key basis is the only route Ive found to work but is useless when I'm dealing with a few thousand frames and I get a change request on the rotation.

Is there anyone that has or knows of a script that will spin objects in a single direction and that can be started and stopped intermittently? I'm more than happy to pay if it works...

Cheers,

-dave

[ads_royje]

Hi @photodave ! 🙂

That is a very good question!

Indeed, all of your render nodes will need the .maxtool in their paths to be used by them.

The workflow is not yet super ironed out, but here is a few things you can do.

Like you mentioned, you can manually copy the tool to all the render nodes in the "user folder" that "should" work, given you know what user is ran when max is started on the render nodes.

You could also copy it to the Max system (program files) folder, that would also work.

Both are a little tedious to do though, specially if you want to add tools often.

Max will pick up automatically all tools in these folders and in this order (if a tool exists in two locations, the first one will be used)

There is also a way to specify custom folders, this is what I would suggest for render node.

In order, Max will build tools from :

. Max system folder.

. User folder.

. Custom folder.

To add custom folders for MCG ,in 3ds Max ini file add [key] and value as follow (path1 is a string that can be anything as long as it is unique) :

[MCG Compound Directories]
path1=D:\some\local\path
path2=\\some\network\path

(add as many paths a you need)

[MCG Tools Directories]
path1=D:\some\local\path
path2=\\some\network\path

(add as many paths a you need)

All render nodes 3dsmax.ini will need to be edited to add the paths. Once this is done, they will pick it up from all renders.

For instance, you update 3dsmax.ini to point to Compounds and Tools on a Network path.

You can copy (or edit from directly if you set your local Max ini to have the same network path) any tools / compounds in those paths and Max will pick  them up on start up.

This is a summary of the network deployment guide :

http://area.autodesk.com/learning/3ds-max-mcg-network-deployment-guide

Let me know if you need more information! 🙂

[edit] :

You can also bake animation on a Max transform controller to send to rendering, to avoid MCG dependencies, if that can ease.

[photodave]

@ads_royje

Thanks again for your help, I only have 7 slaves at this location so I'm going to try dropping the files in to the Program Files Dir.

Cheers,

-dave

[Anonymous]

Hi Roy,

I came across your scipt for controlling rotation speed in 3ds max. It is working great, thanks.

Just one issue i'm having. Once i try to key frame the speed values all seems to be working well but i cannot find any way to get the animation collapsed from this controller so i can export it as fbx file. It looks like when i collapse it, the rotation is converted to just one turn 360 degree over the total animation time. Is there a way to collapse this controller in key frames correctly or am i doing something wrong. I tried collapsing in the motion panels as well as in the curve editor but no luck. It would be awesome if i can export my animated speeds as fbx file.

Thanks,

Dave

[ads_royje]

Hi @Anonymous ,

if you did not yet resolve the export.

The MCG controller should export to FBX with no need to bake before, even with the unsupported warning.

Let me know if you still have the issue.

Regards,