Mental ray proxy aimation

[Anonymous]

Hi everyone,

I wonder if there is someone out there who can help me with this, I have a series of Mental Ray proxy objects which I want to put beside each other and have them move up and down according to the grayscale value of an image, I do not want to bind them to a displace warp object because I want the objects to actually go up and down as opposed to their vertices being displaced, I tried particles and conform, but because they are Mental Ray proxy objects that is not going to work
I can not find a animation controller that would make the Z position of the object based on a gray scale value, anyone has any ideas?

Thanks

N

[PROH]

Hi Norman1102

What about this:
1 - Place a dummy-object at each proxy's pivot point, and link each proxy to the corresponding dummy.
2 - Make a plane and use the greyscale image as displacement map.
3 - Use the"conform" space warp to conform the dummy objects to the displacement plane.
Now the proxy's should follow the greyscale values on z-axis.

[Anonymous]

I Tried that idea, the problem is that I have a few hundred proxies and I will take for ever to conform all of them one by one, I would like a quicker approach

Thanks

[PROH]

How many different proxies do you have? If you only got a few - or maybe only one - then you could set up one of each different proxy, and them use the "clone and align" to distribute them (replacing the originals). This could be done pretty fast.

[PROH]

Just stumbled across this video, demonstrating how to use Image-based Force Fields in MassFX. Another method that might be useful to you: http://www.maxtd.net/?p=1786