I'm seeking a method to model the pages of a book like this:
In the 2d world, this takes just a moment with something like Illustrator's blend:
Here the only splines I drew were the start and finish, specified the number of intermediates, and the rest was a one-click operation.
In max, is there a way to draw two splines and then have a series of intermediates generated? I see the morpher modifier can give me these intermediates; on learning what it is a while ago the only experience I have with it is Autodesk's procedure in their tutorial. I wouldn't mind the labor of producing, say, 40 or 120 copies of the original spline with a morpher mod to create each page; it's setting the morph degree spinner for each that, working without script, drops my jaw. One time is alright, but the ability to shape the image, develop the curavature this way and that ... boost or reduce the number of intermediate pages ... that's where each intermediate would need its spinner changed and a script would make that operation feasible, but I haven't maxscripted in years and don't have a sense of where to begin.
Then again, the morpher may not be the way to go for this, so I can't yet see whether an avoidance of scripting is handicapping me.
There are ways, I'm seeing, to modify a rectilinear solid to look like book pages; one on pawas.com uses a couple of FFD modifiers along with a noise mod to do that --
but such a block has no natural caverns in it -- as you can see in the below details of the top photo, there would be a more lush realism in being able to see into the space between pages that naturally separate a little and create a cavity, with the soft movement of light-to-shadow giving the viewer another point to feel reality with:
I'll use this rendering to promote a font I've designed; by creating an ornamental title page for Don Quixote, it'll look like ... well, an old print of that book, using the new font.
Any thoughts will help a lot, thanks.
The Morpher can help here. Animate the morph over a number of frames. To get the tween copies, use Snapshot (tools menu).
Snapshot works best with meshes rather than splines, so Extrude your page first to the right height.
In Snapshot choose Range and set the number of tweens you want in Copies. Choose Mesh for the Clone Method.
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