Planet Destruction

This week in max I tried to learn how to make the vortex tool work with meshes, i.e. planets, and what I found out was that it can't because the vortex only works with particle systems. I figured that there would be some way to make it work though because there are a seemingly endless amount of things you can create with max. What I found was the PArray particle system which can be used to copy the shape of any mesh. Then using the bind to space warps I bound the PArray to the vortex and was able to achieve whatis shown in the video above.

Space Fun

This week in 3ds max I started a new project in which I will be showing the journey of black holes though our universe. The image above shows one of the last frames of a black hole (the black sphere) consuming a galaxy of stars (the blue particles). Black holes themselves are relatively simple to make considering that there are basically nothingness, so I just used a sphere with a flat black non-reflective material. In order to add something to the scene that you can actually look at I used four super spray particle systems (the blue stars), and bound them to a vortex space warp, which makes the particles get pulled in towards the black hole.

Finished Character and Fun with Physics

In spite of the title I do not actually have a video that can go up on my blog as of today because when I went to upload for this weeks post the file size was too large. Some time next week I will compress the file and upload the video of my finished character in addition to my week 12 post.

This week I made a wrecking ball that swings by a chain into a brick wall causing it to break apart and topple over. This was achieved by using the same MassFX tool that I used to make the mirror shatter from a few weeks back.

Something new that I learned this week was how to use the cloth modifier. In the picture above, the table was set up as a collision object for a plane that had a cloth modifier applied to it.