Author: windyweather

It is possible to use Follow Path and Look At constraints with RTRE, but there is a trick you need to use to make it work.

This animation uses Follow Path, and LookAt to have the red cone follow the path while looking at the central sphere. The path has been duplicated and then rendered as a mesh so that it is visible. Also a second cone was linked to the first cone so that its orientation can be seen as it follows the path.

The moving rods and pistons show another use of LookAt. The horizontal rods are animated to move back and forth. The balls and pistons [just nested cyllinders] are linked to follow the rods. The wide part of the piston is looking at the the ball, and the inner piston is looking at the outer piston. In max, both sets of pistons behave the same, but in RTRE, the red piston fails to behave correctly. Note that it is not possible to have two objects look at each other, so another object, the ball, is required to complete the circuit.

To fix the blue piston in RTRE, it is quite simple. One merely has to add some dummy keyframes to cause RTRE to pickup the animation of the objects as they are transformed by max. To do this, add a position keyframe to the first and last frame. The look at constraints are rotational constraints, so this does not conflict with a position key. But the position keys cause RTRE to pickup the entire transform for the object, including the rotation, so the look at constraint is correctly animated by RTRE.

Download the FollowPath Scene

This animation uses a rotation script for the gears like this:

( eulerAngles 0 0 (360*currenttime/100) ) as quat

This can be customized by either changing the 360 to a larger number of degrees to speed up the animation, or by changing the 100 to match the number of frames in the animation. Balls are linked to the gears so that their rotation can be more easily followed. The gears were created by the Geodesic program available on this site.

Download Rotating Gears

A Quake 3 Arena Dungeon map inspired the RTRE scene. There are 5 rooms and multiple cooridors and numerious animations.

Download Dungeon Map 7

Poolstalk was meant to illustrate how to free your thinking in a virtual world. At the time I did this I was doing a beta test with an on-line virtual community – now long defunct – that allowed one to build buildings and objects in the virtual world, and visit them. Everyone seemed to be intent on building things that looked like the natural world. This is an example of how to free your mind in the virtual world.

The poolstalk scene combines animation with sound and camera capture.
There are two ways to get up to the pool. Walk through the spinning disk of the teleport module and you will be transported to the pool side. Or take the elevator. To use the elevator, navigate near the elevator and then click the green button. If the elevator is not waiting for you , click the red button to bring it down.

Download PoolStalk

CubicSpace RTRE
RTRE is a plug-in for max that provides real time rendering inside of max, and provides a way to publish an exe that can render the scene interactively.

Continue reading “Cubic Space Real Time Rendering Environment”