4 - Competent Setting up and using reactor for w3d

[GeneralCamo]

Author: cuddling, minor editing by GeneralCamo

Skill Level: 4

 

Hello fellow modders! Today im going to go though on how do you animate objects in 3dsmax using reactor and exporting it into W3D

Things you will need:

• Yourself and a computer
• 3dsmax 6 or newer (8 is preferred)

Reactor comes with the software itself, so you do not need to worry about downloading it.

Now, what do you need reactor for? Basically it is to create realistic looking animations in a 3d world, best used or destruction animations or animations that involves lots of objects colliding with one another. For this tutorial, we'll just go through some basics. We will make some spheres and roll off a cone.
 

1. Setting up objects in 3dsmax

Start up 3dsmax. I assume you are completely new to reactor but not 3ds and so we'll get started using basic objects.

Create a plane 50 x 50 at the origin. This is our "ground" where our objects will fall to.

Next, create some basic objects that you will like to make them "fall". A bunch of spheres will do just nicely, so make like 5 of those things of apporiate size above the plane itself.

To make things more interesting, put a cone in the middle of the plane, so that the balls will hit and roll off.

Now, you might want to wall them in to prevent the balls from falling off the edge of the plane entirely, build a couple of walls around the edges of the plane. This is of course entirely up to you, if you want them to fall off, don't put them there.

 

 

2. Assigning reactor properties to objects in 3dsmax

Now we are going to set up the collision settings for reactor in 3ds.

At the top of the program, you should see a tab called "reactor". Click on it and select "Open Property Editor". A box should appear. This controls the property settings of the objects that you are going to use for reactor.

Select the 5 spheres (together) and give them a mass of 50.
Select the walls, the cone and the plane and give them a mass of 200, and check the box "unyielding". This would mean they will never move and only objects will collide with them.

Leave all of them at Mesh Convex Hull, except for the plane, which should be a concave hull. In this tutorial this is not very important and it is only in more advanced reactor settings you will need to play around with the different simlation geometry.

 

 

 

 

3. Setting all objects up as a rigid body collection.

A rigid body collection is a collection of objects that has rigid body properties, such as the objects we have in the scene at the moment.

Go to Reactor > Create Object > Rigid Body Collection. Place it anywhere in the scene, preferbly somewhere convinent.

After selecting it, go to the modify tab (The one at the right side) and click on "Add". A window like the one shown below should appear.

As we are using all of our objects in this tutorial, go ahead and select all of them. They should now appear in the box under the Rigid Body Properties in Rigid Bodies.

 

 

 

4. Finishing up reactor

The last step is to set up how you want reactor to process the animation.

Go to tabs at the right side. Select Utilities, and click on the reactor box. You should now be directed to the screenshot below. I'll quickly go through the basic stuff.

• Start Frame: This is where you want reactor to start the animation.
• End Frame: This is where reactor will stop (For this I set to 200)
• Frames/Key: This is where reactor will insert a keyframe at every number of frames. If you put 5. At every 5 frames there will be a keyframe.

Leave the rest of the "Timing" properties at default.

• Create Animation: creates the animation in 3dsmax. Note that this is irrevesible.
• Preview Animation: previews the animation before you create it. So you can fine-tune it till your expections.
• Gravity: What can I say, its gravity. Unless your world has some weird forces around, you will want to leave x and y at 0. For z, it is up to how strong your gravity is. The larger the value, the more force your objects are pulled down towards the world. For W3D, you will want to set this to -18.8. The normal gravity at -9.8 feels very light.
• World Scale: 1m to 1.0 in max. Don't ever change that.
• Col. Tolerance: This is one of the most important property in reactor's utilities. This is the "minimum distance" between each object. The lower it is, the closer each object has to be before it considers it "colldied". Unfortunely, this cannot be set to 0, so for now put it as 0.02 (This is 2cm in W3D, hardly noticable)

Leave the rest at defaults, they are not needed for now.

Go ahead and hit Preview, a window should come up that has your objects in it. Press P to play the animation and R to reset. When you're happy enough, click on "Create Animation" to create it.

 

5. Exporting to W3D

Finally, we want to export it as a W3D file. Go to Files > Export and select W3D asset as the type of file to export. Select "Hierachical Animation Model'



To check whether did it work, go to w3d viewer and open the file. Select the animation and it should play like what it showed in 3dsmax.



Congratulations! You have just done your first reactor animation and successfully export it as a w3d animation file which is ready for use in Level Editor.

This is of course still very basic, and reactor is capable of processing much more complex and realistic animations if you know what to do.

 

[trunkskgb]

The pictures in this tutorial are no longer showing. Can we get an update? I'm curious to see what this tutorial is for.

[moonsense715]

Fixed!