Motion Designer Question ???

[andy gee]

Hi again every body

I have a question regarding Motion designer in lightwave 7.5

I look on the net at some demonstration scenes using motion designer.

one scene was a 6 polygon box falling to the ground bouncing a bit then coming to a stop. It didnt have any explanation to how it was done, so i had a go my self .

I created a box no added segments just plain then created the floor with lots of segments. I assained them layer names and surface names.

Put them in layout then added motion designer i got the box to fall to the floor object BUT it just collapsed FLAT it was'nt RIGGED enough so what am i doing wrong !!!

I know i could do the same thing using FX MOTION and FX COLLISION

But i want to understand Motion Designer better. Also I can only make a cloth object (collision) fall realistically over a ball object (target) if i set the skin thickness to 0.3 which puts a big gap between them any words of advice to sort this out ??? anybody ?

If any body can help with either of these then that would be great

Cheers Andy Gee !!:confused: :mad:

[fxnut]

I haven't used Motion Designer for a v long time. but I think I can help (but some of the details might be wrong).

To stop the box collapsing, you need to add 'cross struts'. Basically, you need to connect vertices at opposite corners of the box together - probably using 2 point polys is the easiest way (I think that should work, otherwise you'll have to use triangles). Motion Designer uses the edges of polygons to create spring constraints between the vertices, so unless you add these connections it'll just fall apart.

As for the skin thickness problem, just use a dummy collision sphere with a radius 0.3 less than the sphere you want the cloth to visually collide with. Then make the collision sphere invisible to the camera.