Tuesday 29 September 2009

Car Smash

This was only supposed to be a test to learn Box Tools #2, so I was expecting it to take a few days, in the end it took a week to finish! Box Tools #2 still has a lot of bugs in it in my opinion & corrupted a few of my max files so most of the weeks was spent finding a work around. I was working between Max x32 for Box Tools #2 to work with PhysX & Max x64.

Originally I started out crushing the car & using Particle Skinner in Box #2 to collapse the mesh as the Engine falls onto it. This too a few attempts but the info on Orbaz's site is quite hidden but when found is really helpful! The idea did work but as you read on it might be better just to use an FFD box or something else.

The problems arose after cracking the ground using Rayfire & using the pieces as PhysX collision objects. This seems add something to the Max file which you can't delete. If you delete everything in the scene (except the ground pieces) & all PhysX links etc, when you open the file in Max x64 the PhysX comand prompt would emerge stating PhysX was in the scene somewhere. This on its own didn't cause problems but later on when using FumeFX. I found that FumeFX would not Sim passed frame 30 even tho the PFlow I was using to emit FumeFX Smoke from had no PhysX on it! In the end I had to re build the scene but still had problems after merging the ground peices in.

So after all the problems, I got what I could out of the experiece & this is the result. I'm not happy with it & I don't think I'll be using Box Tools #2 in rush again. Don't get me wrong the Box is a great idea but I think it still has a shed load of bugs that need to be ironed out. Keep up the good work tho Orbaz!







2 comments:

Glacierise (a.k.a. Hristo Velev) said...

Interesting experiment! Could you have worked round the problems by meshing the frags and then emitting particles/ffx in another scene? Im still to try these workflows, any info is very interesting.

StevieMac said...

Meshing the frags? By using mesher or something? That might have worked yeah, but I'd already made 2 extra scenes already heh heh I'll give it a go later. ;0)