abvfx Posted December 15, 2008 Share Posted December 15, 2008 Hey Guys. Ive made a decent rolling ball rig. To play with Houdini's Animation tools. I have everything i need, except one thing. Procedural or automatic ball roll. I downloaded a mel script from highend 3d and tried to decipher it but my mel knowledge isnt what it used to be. So if anyone out there has any suggestions i would be happy to try it out. All i would like to know how to do is Translate the ball in the X, or Z direction and have the ball rotate in the appropriate way. I would love it if i could also have a Y rotation but X, Z are the most important. Thanks again. hjbtrf Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rdg Posted December 16, 2008 Share Posted December 16, 2008 I have everything i need, except one thing. Looks like this is the crucial thing Take a look here: silly challenge, rolling boxes Or maybe here: Quaternions - Where To Enter Them?, just another sandbank The script [1] in the second post originally animates rolling spheres and works perfect in 3dsmax [2]. After reading and asking a lot about Quaternions I now get the impression that the 3dsmax implementation might be somewhat different/simplifying from the puristic Houdini approach - if this is even possible. Anyway - I was never able to recreate it. But I had fairly good results recently using a combination of fileSOPs set to read and write modes to apply the discreet steps of rotation to the geometry. Quite a disk scraper. I can publish it maybe beginning of next year. If you're a master/apprentice user you might want to take a look into DOPs and the SOP solver. [1] Cuneyt Ozdas "Rolling Ball" http://www.cuneytozdas.com/tutorials/maxscript/ [2] http://www.preset.de/2007/0525/rollingcube/ 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
odforceuser42 Posted February 21, 2009 Share Posted February 21, 2009 what's the status of this rig? in regard to the "automatic rolling" based on movement, is there a way to record or save the previous position of the ball even if the movement is not animated? IOW, is it possible to have such a feature in a rig and have it rotate the ball while the slider for tx or tz are moved without having keyframes or channels on tx or tz? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
old school Posted February 23, 2009 Share Posted February 23, 2009 Absolutely. Best to do this in CHOPs. See the attached hip file and dive in to the CHOP network. There is a neat Distance CHOP that does all the work. You then have to convert linear to rotation. That's also done in there. rolling_wheel_v04.hip The file is fully commented for you. MMB (MiddleMouseButton) on the commented nodes (the ones with the colored names, blue by default but can change based on whatever color scheme you are using). 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.