Animation Woes
I’m going to try something a little bit differently here today. I’m going to write about a problem that I have been encountering lately using 3DsMax. Maybe, just maybe, someone reading here will have some insight.
So, I’ve been taking a class lately on medical 3D animation. For my topic, I chose to delve further into the sliding filament theory of muscle contraction. I was having a little trouble getting the myosin necks to move appropriately and the advice to that was to use bones. Having never done that before, it’s been a madhouse of tutorials and learning all that I can about using them. It took a little while but I finally got them to work. Now, being an individual neck of the myosin, it made sense to instance the little heads and neck cluster across the myofilament, and then instance the myofilament itself to build the 3D reality of how myosin and actin myofilaments interact.
Sounds great right? Well I thought so. And I sure was excited when I finally got the bones set up with inverse kinematics, and the myosin heads and neck shape skinning it without distortion. I made a bunch of instances, and the whole row of them would do a little chorus line dance when I pulled the strings on the lead myosin head and neck group. The next part is where it starts to get wonky.
So I took my instances and carefully placed them all along the body of the myofilament. I found that removing the kinematics and bones from the instances allowed me more flexability in placement and still kept the movements I was after. Everything looked great. You might even say it was fantastic. But after several rebuilds of my scene, I have come to learn that this is the exact point where things go haywire. I have been saving the project all along, but it seems that I cannot open any of the saved versions after this point. Well, I *can* open them, but it’s never the way I’ve left it.
So for instance, this is a screen shot of my happy little project *prior* to turning anything off, or shutting down…
Then this is what happens when I open the same project later (I believe there are actually a few minutes of work between these two screen shots, but not much). The myosin heads and necks fly off, out into my scene. As you can see, I’m hitting a glitch…
So I spoke with a friend about it, who has done some work in games. He had me convinced that the problem I was hitting just had to be the mirror modifier that I’d used to make the intertwined necks of the myosin heads. So I deleted and rebuilt the myosin yet again, only to learn that the mirror modifier is not in fact the problem, and I am still unable to save and reopen the project.
My modifier stack is clean as a whistle, just the object used as skin and the skin modifier. My bones on their own right are great. My inverse kinematics are just what I wanted. This happens whether objects are grouped or ungrouped. The actin myofilaments remain unaffected. So what is going on with my myosin? I am at a complete loss for this one.
If any of you reading have ever come across this before, I would love to hear about it, and particularly what you did to either fix it or get around it.