propeller rotation / nvidia physx for 3ds max

[aryez91]

Hello,

What's the easiest way to rotate propellers?

Dynamic physics actor object with a joint? in that case, will the 3DS Max Physx plugin provided in nvidias site create the joint? It seem to export only PXPROJ/APX/APB and not XML as described in the counterpart Maya tutorial.

Is there a simple node flow way of doing it?

Many thanks,
Arye.

[dan.matlack · Accepted solution]

Hi aryez91,

For a propeller, if you'd like something fairly realistic, you would want to have two meshes in your hierarchy -- one that is the propeller and one that is a plane with an alpha blur of a propeller. You would start hiding the blur mesh in the unit. Then on start/ramp up, you would rotate the propeller mesh, ramping it up over time until it reach a point you are happy with, then you would swap -- hide the propeller mesh and show the blend mesh. This will give you a fairly realistic prop in game. If you are just wanting to rotate a prop around, you can use a rotation flow node:

Documentation may be found here: http://help.autodesk.com/view/Stingray/ENU/?guid=__flow_ref_cat_Unit_html

Let me know how that works out for you or if you need further assistance!

[aryez91]

Thank you for your answer, I can see now how it would work.