3ds Max Beginners: ANIMATION Crash Course. Learn to animate anything!!

hey what's up everyone this is kyle also known as simulation lab here in brooklyn new york and we're back again with a new tutorial of 3d studio max this one's a crash course on animation all right and within 3ds max you can animate pretty much everything right and we'll really get into the weeds of what that really means but in this crash course we're really covering five methods of animation right and we're going to be covering all these different techniques within those five methods that you can use um at your disposal for when you're creating things and by watching this tutorial and you can use it to refer back to um you know you can you can probably animate just about anything after after we cover all of these methods right so the five methods are really covering the first one is transform based animation right and basically what that means is like moving stuff around the screen animating scaling and just basic stuff like that rotation and whatever um the second method we're gonna be covering is modifier-based animation right so you can animate all the parameters of all the modifiers and you can use the modifiers in ways that you might not think they would be used for right it kind of just depends on the effect they're going for the third method we're going to be covering is animating with constraints so we're going to be covering the path constraint uh the position constraint we touched on uh the path constraint a little bit in the beginner's crash course um for 3ds max so if you haven't watched that video it's a couple years old um so i'm it's it's due for an update but still all the methods stay the same in that video so it's still relevant um there will be an update to that video uh coming relatively soon we'll be doing a new crash course based on uh the uh newer version of uh 3d studio max so we're still using 2018 um we're still going to be using 2018 for the next for this tutorial and maybe the next couple um i know a lot of people use earlier versions so i just wanted to keep this sort of middle ground uh between really early versions and the newest versions 2022 so anyway the the fourth and fifth methods that we're going to be covering is based on simulation right so we're going to be simulating things with mass effects physics-based simulations and uh simulating with uh the the cloth tools that 3ds max comes with um we won't be covering thai flow so um i do have a you know a separate uh playlist of all the thai flow tutorials in my channel so if you're interested in that like more advanced simulation techniques i definitely definitely recommend uh checking out some thai flow stuff it's a it's a huge amazing tool set um to plug in for max and we're just going to be in this crash course we're just going to be focusing on everything that comes built into 3ds max right so with those five methods in mind let's jump right in so i have a fresh maxine loaded up here we'll customize your units unit setup we're going to be using the metric system centimeters and uh system units set up one unit equals one centimeter cool so i typically like to do that sometimes it doesn't really matter okay so in our perspective view um we hit alt w go into our perspective view [Music] again if you haven't seen the beginner's crash course guide on 3d studio max uh on my the video i'll link it down below i definitely recommend checking out that before jumping into this one um also i do have a crash course on how to model anything like how to 3d model anything so check that video out too because we're going to be covering some stuff that we're going to be going pretty quick here with just modeling stuff so if you're not familiar with like basic modeling features and like how to model stuff in max then i would definitely recommend checking out those videos anyway so let's create a box right so we'll just toss a box in our scene it doesn't really matter how big it is or what you know just just create one just put it somewhere um and what we're going to do is we're going to focus down here on this timeline right so now we have you you might have a different number here this might be different for you so what we're going to do is we're going to set our timeline configuration here so in this little time clock uh icon down there and click on that and uh in our length or our frame count here you know we'll do is uh in our length we'll set this to be um 30 right so we have 30 frames so now you should see down here is 30 frames of animation this little timeline that's down here right so what we're going to do is we're going to do a simple little um animation on this guy just moving him back and forth right so on our timeline we're going to drag this out to about 15 seconds and what we can do is we can turn on this auto key right and if you enable auto key anything you do to the assets in your scene while auto key is on while you know you see the timeline down here is is red and the viewport has a red red frame around it anything you do to your objects here is going to be recorded as a keyframe so let's say if i just drag this along the x-axis right now it creates a keyframe here and a keyframe back here so now if i scrub the timeline back to the original you'll notice that it changes right it translates cool so now we can do is we can grab this keyframe if we hold shift and drag the keyframe uh we'll put it we'll put one at the end right so what that's going to do is it's just going to replace it's going to go back to original location so if we turn off auto key we hit play we just have a simple transform animation that goes from left to right right now this is going nice and smooth it's pretty much what we want but let's say if we create a duplicate of this right right and for this cube what we're going to do is we're going to open up our curve editor right so there's a couple ways you can get to the curve editor you can right click and you can uh click on curve editor or you can just click on this little button in the timeline right there so that's going to open up this curve editor we're going to be looking at this a couple times during this during this video um but right now we're just going to really briefly touch on like what some of the stuff is so what we can do is uh click on these two buttons here and sort of like get a larger scope uh see the full sort of curve of this object so we currently we know that we're animating the object in the x direction right so x is the red arrow right and so this translates here where it's uh the red curve right and so what we want to do is we want to keep this one the same so we'll keep this one a sort of um you see how it's curved like this well we can we can change that if we want to right so we can select these um little uh curve editor components right there you know little dots right and we can choose to modify that what we can do is we can set the tangent to linear right so now it's more of like a um a linear pattern where it goes up and down right so what does that what does that really mean so if we close the curve editor and we play this the animations the top one is going to stop stopped abruptly while the bottom one is going to have that nice smooth curve you see how that looks so you can play with this a little bit and like kind of really understand how well how this is looking we can even slow this down for a little bit if we want to so we'll slow this down to half speed maybe help us get a little bit more better understanding of what this is actually doing so the bottom one is still nice and smooth right it goes to the end and then it has like a sort of like uh not a delay but it's like nice and smooth right the top one it stops abruptly stop stop stops like a game of pong right and so that is what those this is that kind of general idea is things that you can do in the curve editor right is you can edit um the uh values in the curvature to make it more abrupt or more smooth you can adjust these and get it really and uh sort of more refined control over your animation right so that's the first time we're going to look at this i just wanted to show you guys what the curve editor is and just give you a little brief uh intro there so next thing we're going to look at in our sort of transform based animation techniques is just animating simple properties right so let's create like a pyramid and we'll just stick a pyramid in here in our scene again it doesn't really matter how big it is right um and we'll maybe just move that out of the way of the cubes put down here um okay so in our properties here in the parameters of this you know basic object right that we just created um if we hit on auto key and we'll scrub to 15 seconds right we can animate any one of these properties right so we can animate the height so make the height go up and you'll notice this black keyframe shows up here the black keyframes are up here when you animate properties of objects right so what that does is it does exactly what you think it would do right so now we have this little red slider here that means that property is currently being animated so we can grab this keyframe and drag it over to the end and cool so now we have this animated pyramid so that just proves the point that you can literally animate anything with with the timeline right so you can animate properties you can animate translation you know transform um uh values um and anything else so it's it that that in that way is super powerful right so one more thing we'll look at real quick in in this uh in this sort of context we'll just move this stuff out of the way um go back here to zero uh we'll look at um sort of like uh we'll touch really briefly on procedural animation what that means is that there's a there's a few sort of like automated ways of animating things in macs um so what we'll do is we'll just show you with an example we can drag out a teapot right and what we're going to do is we'll link the teapot to a sort of dummy object and animate the dummy object right so in our helpers we can create a dummy or you know we can create a point let's just create a point so just stick a point somewhere in our scene we can put that point anywhere maybe just right there or whatever um and what we'll do is we'll uh select and link use our select and link tool and we'll click and drag on the teapot right and get this little select link tool pops up and we'll just link that to the point right so if you um if you watch the uh how to rig anything tutorial we use you know the sort of select and link tool quite a bit so you can you know check that that video out um anyway so now that anywhere we move that point the teapot is going to follow right so we can move the teapot independently of the point right so now what we can do is we can animate the point moving right so let's say for instance if we wanted to animate the point moving back and forth we already know how to do that right so let's drag out to 15 hit auto key and move the teapot that way right and we can hold shift and drag and just create a duplicate of the first keyframe so it'll just kind of go back and forth in a smooth motion right so a cool thing we can do now is we can effect the teapot and we can animate the teapot let's say for instance if we wanted to have the teapot move like over here or whatever we can we can put in all these different keyframes on the teapot while it's linked to the other to the to the point as it's moving right so we can go along here and we can go say move the teapot over here we can move the teapot over here right and we can animate it while it's moving right and i know that's not terribly complicated but it's something that you might not be you might not be aware of right so that's cool one other thing though is we can automate the movement of the teapot with a noise modifier or something right not with a noise modifier but with a noise sort of automation so what we can do is in our motion tab here we click on position and we can click on assign controller and we can do a uh noise position controller right and what that's going to do is if we scrub this along here it's going to still move along with the point right but it's super jaggy so what we could do is uh increase or decrease the frequency a little bit and we could turn off fractal noise it'll be smooth and we'll take a look at what this is doing and it's kind of like it has this like sort of fluid motion to it right it's but it's noisy so we can increase the frequency a little bit right and it kind of bobs and up and down it's it's all automated and it loops perfectly which is great so what we can do here is we can remove the z strength we just set the z strength to zero so it'll just have noise in x and y so it'll kind of dance around and we can kind of play this and see how it looks okay so that's pretty cool right i mean like it uh it you know like that's like one way you can automate stuff um it's just like piping tossing on um constraints right uh in the uh animation controller for this particular object right so um those are like a couple of those very basic um things that you can animate right and so what i'm going to do is i'm going to pop open my layers panel here and i'm just going to assign all this stuff to i have some layers set up already i have this all set up to sort of like a sliding boxes layer or whatever the next thing we're going to be looking at is a bouncy box right so we'll hide all this stuff and i'll choose i'll set on my bouncy box by the way i'm i'm going to be cleaning up this uh file and organizing everything and i'll make the file available um for download so i'll put a download link in the description okay so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to create a simple bouncing animation right and we're going to do it in a couple different ways i'll show you a couple different you know techniques of how to how to do this there's a million ways you can do a balancing animation um but we'll focus on the very basics and maybe we'll do a little bit more advanced one so we'll start by going under extended primitives and we'll create a chamfer box i'm going to stick that in our scene like that and uh click again make sure that we have the box created go under a modified tab and we'll do a little bit of a fill it on the edges just to make it look kind of cool right and it could be any size really it doesn't really matter so maybe we'll just do like um 50 and 30 yeah 40 by um 60 yeah by yeah like um 75 right cool so we have our little uh chamfer box here we can add some segments we can have some wood segments and uh length segments and height segments well we'll see i'll show you why this is important later um i'll add a few more just give it let me get a little bit more dense right cool um and now what we could do is uh you know what i might do is i might toss on a little material i have a material created in here so i have a little face so i'll slap on a face uh material and put a little uvw map on fire on it um map set it to planer just like oops cool this is just me having fun now it's kind of like a character right [Music] okay so first thing we're going to do is we'll click on our character and right click and convert to editable poly that'll just remove the uvw modifier we don't really need to see that anymore so what we can do is in our time configuration we'll set this back to 1x i've previously had it at half x speed so set that back to 1x right we'll drag our timeline over to um with our i guess with that edit with the timeline at zero we'll just drag up in z um a little character here and then we'll drag over to 15 frames turn on auto key and then we'll right click on our z transform here let's set that back down to zero right so that just so the jump cycle will start at zero it'll be in midair at zero and then we'll hit the floor at 15 right cool [Music] okay so with that done um what we can do is there's a couple things we can do right we can grab this last keyframe and hold shift and drag that over so now we have like a full cycle right and around that like 12 minute mark or so we could do is uh hit r or you can use your scale uh click the scale button up here and we can uh hit set key okay and then drag over to like 15 seconds or so you know we'll do is we'll just get rid of this one for now so we can like visualize how this is actually working um after the 15 second mark after 15 frame mark around 17 frames or so what we could do is we can you know scale scale it to make it look like he's kind of squashing down right [Music] so when he hits the ground he kind of squishes right so that's like one this is just one way of doing this right um and then now to get him back to where he was that basically we'd grab this little keyframe we can grab this key frame here and hold shift and drag that over somewhere here right so he like snaps back a little fast so we could do is like slow that down a little bit so what this is going to do effectively if we zoom out and play this thing i mean that needs some tweaking right but it kind of gets the the general that's the general idea is he can like even you can tweak this forever and make it look pretty good but it's it's just a standard like really cheap way of making him look like he's like squishing when he hits the ground right so there's a couple other ways we can do this so let's let's get rid of these key frames you know what we'll do is uh we'll leave our transform keyframe so we'll just remove these ones for the scale so now we just have them going up and down and so now we can animate uh our little character squishing by using a modifier so it's a different slightly different way of doing this so we can do is uh with our character selected we can scroll down and uh put on an ffd three by three so this is g this will give us a lattice work of um a sort of lattice of control points that we can uh use to manipulate what our character looks like right so we can squish them in we're not working stuff and we can move these around so that's that should be pretty cool for what we need um so again this is just like another sort of simple way of doing this but what we can do is um with auto key selected turned on i mean so we'll uh you'll scroll uh maybe like halfway between um where he's at the very top of his jump and uh where he almost hits the ground we can grab all these control points maybe scale him inward and stretch him out a little bit as he's falling right and so as he's falling he kind of gets stretched out a little bit right and then right i guess like right after he hits the ground what we can do is um maybe like scale them inward a little bit and stretch them out like a little bit like that we can grab these and kind of squish them down grab these ones move these down like that right and kind of like squish it like that so what that'll effectively do is he's like falling gets stretched out and then right and he hits the ground it gets squished right and then we can grab this um i guess we can grab this keyframe pull this one out here and then that'll like um sort of complete the cycle like right when he gets squished he like starts going back upward right we can always grab this keyframe and pull this one all the way to the end right to complete the cycle and we'll kind of just see how this plays out and so that's like a little bit more convincing because that kind of makes him look a little bit more like jelly or rubber or something you know so we can even deselect this we can uh uh kind of visualize it a little bit better so i i like that i mean it that that looks kind of like a bouncing eraser or bouncing piece of rubber from a little rubber character or something right so that's kind of convincing so the next thing we can do is we can instead of using a lattice modifier we could go ahead and erase these and we'll just uh set up a new um a little keyframe here for the beginning and we'll get rid of our ffd um so now we have just the standard animation going up and down cool and so we can do is we can do like i don't know we could try a melt modifier right so now with our melt modifier on we can just drag over here and then around this point what we want to do is just test and see how this is going to look right so we can do percentage of melt we can do make this jelly right and so we can play with these parameters maybe we want to kind of squish them out a little bit more like that right and so this this is going to make them look like kind of gooey right and um so that this melt amount is what's controlling the melt so if it's at zero there's no melt and if it's at you know we go as far down as we want to right so i think about there might be kind of cool right and you can maybe spread out a little bit more or something right so that might be pretty cool so let's let's kind of like see how this how this looks right so we could do is like right at that 12 mark or whatever we can like maybe set a keyframe right there all right but just by like clicking like going up a couple or just like one or whatever and just going back down to zero that'll set a keyframe there right so that'll be our baseline and then right after 15 seconds right what we could do is uh increase this you know so instead of melt them out to like 46 or seven or so right so that'll like squish him right down right and then we can set another keyframe here by hitting zero right we can like right click on that and then of course we can always grab our last keyframe and we kind of see how this animation plays out right so this one's like a little bit more fun and a little bit more dynamic right obviously we can stretch these out a little bit and make it a little bit better looking um but yeah so i mean that's just like a different way of doing that so that's that's animating modifier parameters um to get this a sort of similar effect now you can always like layer these effects right you can always animate um multiple modifiers on top of this character and maybe if you did want to use the lattice modifier or if you want to animate a scale um transform right on him as he's coming down here you can toss in like another keyframe to animate the scale right and you can you have like full control now like what this thing's actually looking like what it's doing pretty cool okay so the next method that we're going to be focusing on is animating with constraints right um so we're going to be taking a look at the path constraint and the position constraint and for this demonstration i've modeled this really terrible looking pickup truck with a little dude in it right he's got a little steering wheel he's cruising around right so the idea is here uh with this with this car um we're gonna animate this car cruising around a track so we're going to draw on a track we're going to have him sort of procedurally animating along the track and then while he's cruising around um we will uh maybe have uh we'll control his arm right he's going to be waving his arm over at traffic and stuff or whatever um in an automated way right so we're not we're not you know what we could we could do right is with it with his arm moving up and down we can do auto key right and we can like every couple frames or whatever we can do this right and then so that so we can manually animate this thing right if we grab all these keyframes and copy them over and then so like we can make his arm wave like that that's kind of like um but what happens if we extend this uh the animation out right to like five minutes long or something right then we have to go back through and copy all these keyframes and then it's not dynamic right what if we wanted to wave really quickly or really slowly or if we want what if we want more control over that sort of thing right and so i mean this is an extremely simple example but it applies to to you know larger scale um concepts and stuff that you might work on in the future right so um just i want to keep everything as simple as possible in these little you know technique demonstrations so with our arm selected go underneath our curve editor here um and we can drag this down and underneath rotation we have our x and our y rotation right so i think it's our y rotation let's see yeah that's our y-axis yeah so that's what we want to rotate this thing on i think so what we'll do is uh underneath our y rotation down here we'll right click do uh assign controller and we can sign all different kinds of controllers here um so we'll do a waveform float and see what that looks like so that'll give us like a sort of sine wave or whatever wave we specify and so here it what we could do is kind of zoom out so we can see what our amp uh sort of amplitude looks like and obviously this is amplitude's way too much right so we want to we want to bring this down a little bit something more manageable like 10 right and so now if we zoom out again here so that's looking pretty cool right but it's um kind of like sticking directly upward right but so we can we can bring that down with our vertical bias so if we click on manual we can uh you know bring that up or down right so maybe we want to go a little bit further down with it so it starts about there and uh something like that might work right it's kind of wiggling so maybe we can do like a period of like 20. see what that looks like right so maybe even 20 like maybe 30. and we can sort of tweak this a little bit further right so that's kind of cool zoom out all the waves we can see this thing we can even use our little magnifying glass tool and visualize the entire uh period right of the uh of the wave so that looks like it might work so let's just uh let's close this out hit close and we'll just hit play and see what it looks like right so that's going to cycle like once every i don't know 30 frames or whatever you know so we could do is if we go back in there i'll show you how to open this back up with our arm selected scroll down and underneath uh rotation you can hit properties and it'll bring up your little waveform controller again um so we could do is uh we'll stretch this out again and say at a period we'll just like make that a little bit more frequent so you kind of you can wiggle his arm and all these properties are of course anima you can animate all of these right um so if we uh go ahead and hit play now it's wiggling really fast right so we could do is um maybe bring that period back to something a little bit more reasonable you know something like that hit play okay [Music] that'll work fine for now i think and what you could do is to get this looping correctly um you know like you can uh sort of match up the uh ample the peak and the sort of crest of the amplitude right i'm not going to really worry about that but i just wanted to show you that you know you can play with all these different sine waves and stuff right like this and this one you know is obviously a sine wave you can do all kinds of different you know sawtooth waves and stuff like that if you want to you know i don't know you can play with this uh forever right you know anyway so we'll leave that one as is um so yeah so now that we have our little dude in his pickup truck waving his arm around what we can do is uh create a little track for him to to cruise around on right so in our create tab and shapes to uh i guess we could do a circle but i guess would be a little bit more fun is just doing a line so we'll do a smooth smooth line right and we can just kind of draw this anywhere just start here and kind of make a little race track right make something a little bit blobby you can kind of go back through here and edit this thing select spline yep um and i don't know you can you can control this however you want make it look cool and maybe i'll make mine have a little bend in it like that all right whatever this is it's good enough for now okay so first things you want to do is um with the car um we want everything to sort of be linked to the car's body i think we could we could set up a dummy object if we want to like a point like we did before when we animated the teapot earlier but for this demonstration i think we could just like have everything linked to the car body so what we want to do is go ahead and do that so we'll select and link leave the steering wheel of the body you could just make all this one object but the cool thing about linking stuff is that now you can these wheels are instances of each other so we can um apply animation to the wheels if we wanted to i don't think we're going to get that far into detail with this example but um the way that you would animate the wheels now is just you know you can put on like a uh uh an animation constraint you know how to do that now right and then you can have the wheels turn infinitely right as the car is moving and you can make the wheels rotate right um by having having linked the wheels to the to the car like this so we want to link the little dude's body to the car and what we can do is link the arms to the dude's body right so now if we could do if we wanted to we could like rotate the little guy around and stuff if you have like a little camera in the car looking at him or something you can have him doing stuff or whatever like while he's driving and everything can set this thing up to be sort of procedural in that way right so now if we move the car everything should be linked to the car which it is that's cool and um with our little track here we can maybe make this a little slightly lighter color so we can see it all the time um [Music] we could add a little bit more interpolation to that track so it's a little bit smoother you can see it's a little bit jaggy so we'll do is another interpolation increase that a little bit so it's nice and smooth right um and then now we could do is uh we'll just go ahead and grab the car under our motion tab under position select position and we can uh hit assign controller this is the same way as we did in the curve editor right i mean you can you can pick a particular position axis or something and assign a controller in the curve editor or you could just do it here in the little motion tab right so it's just multiple ways to access that tool right so uh with a position selected we'll hit assign controller and we'll do path constraint and pathing straight the parameters here um they prop you to add a path so we'll click add path and we'll just select our line right and now if we scrub the timeline um it's going around the path and that's pretty cool but we wanted to drive in the direction of uh particular access we wanted to drive in the the car is pointing the way we modeled it it's pointing in the y direction um so we wanted to follow it right so we can hit follow right and if we hit follow now what it's going to do is it's going to follow the path but it's just it's oriented in the wrong axis so what we could do is hit the y axis right and being that our car is modeled facing in the y direction right now the axis is going to be correct so it's going to look like it's cruising along right cool now he's cruising along he's going pretty pretty fast so we can just to visualize that the speed will will slow it down again for just uh it's like now you can see you know if you look at his arm his arms wiggling around you know um and he's having a good time driving his little his little truck that's cool um another thing we could do is let's say for instance if the car was a fighter jet or something right um you can click on this bank um check box here right and the car is going to sort of like follow around curves right and that's like pretty extreme i mean like maybe we could model uh the path like the road to have like bends in it and stuff and we can make it look like a sort of like formula one racetrack or something you know but in our case he's just kind of cruising around a flat road so we can uncheck bank right you know so that's pretty cool so now that we have that set up um i don't know we can mess around a little bit just a little bit right and uh we can hold shift and duplicate the path um we can even grab this path and move it upward right so just to delete this one just to make sure the wheels are like touching the ground which looks like there and we can grab a duplicate of our path just set that to z um and under rendering we could just enable uh in viewport and hit rectangular and we can kind of just like make a little uh racetrack for him to cruise along so it's like a little road and the great thing about this is that it's you know well i guess we could have made it out an instance but um it's procedural you know right so we can like adjust some of these things you know and it'll adjust the uh um the animation right obviously um this one's gonna have to be adjusted too because we didn't make it an instance but you can always go back and do that right yeah so that way um you know we can always modify the track and it'll always update the animation and keep it current so now we looked at the path constraint um we can look at the position constraint really quickly um so the simplest way to do that um is we could just like try it out with a camera so if you go under create cameras standard cameras we can just toss in a physical camera in here so i'll just like stick it right here right and maybe i'll just like lift this camera up in z a little bit and then i'll grab our the camera sort of look point right the target and we can under motion under position we can click assign controller and we can do a position constraint and click ok and then this is going to ask for the target the uh the target of what this item with the position could train edit uh should be locked to right so what's the what's the target position so we go add position and we can click on our car right and wherever our um axis is or wherever our like gizmo is located in our car the origin of the object that's where the position constraint is going to be linked to so now if we hit play no matter where our car goes our camera is going to follow it just because the the um you know the look point is uh um is linked linked to the car now right so what we can do is like in our one of our viewports we can go under left or you know we can go to cameras and uh choose to look through our our viewport right so if we hit play so it's always going to be looking at the camera right so this is like one kind of like a fun way that you can you know use position constraints and not have to you don't have to add keyframes to the the movement of particular objects right we did very little keyframe animation here actually i think there is zero keyframe animation here this is all just you know procedurally sort of created animation based on some really simple tools that max has built in right okay so the next method we're going to be taking a look at uh which is method number four is uh simulation with mass effects right and so um so mass effects is a sort of built-in physics engine in the 3ds max that you can use to simulate um like sort of uh rigid or dynamic um little physics simulations right so we'll take a look at in sort of detail what that actually means um for example we'll start with a simple little dominoes uh you know everyone probably knows what dominoes you stack them up and you can knock them over and they you know they sort of cascade in this like really kind of neat way anyway everyone probably knows what dominoes is so we'll just go ahead and create a domino and choose my layer um i'll create a domino as a box right keep it really really simple at first um you know what maybe we'll like make it a little bit taller so yeah you know set this to be like i don't know 35 by 10 by 50 or something right and what we can do is um we can copy one of these out so hold shift drag on the x direction about like that far or so right we'll copy all these as instances right so maybe we'll copy like i don't know six instances or something like that um and then we'll grab one of these and enter our modified panel we'll drop this down and we'll do mass effects rigid body right and so now that we've applied this modifier to one of these dominoes all of them will have that same mass effects rigid body modifier applied to them right so we want to make sure that this is set to dynamic right so there's a couple different bridge body types there's dynamic which is like all the moving stuff there's kinematic um which can be sort of triggered to do something um or it can be part of a simulation but not actually moving or simulating and a static is something that you would simulate against right um so the ground by default is a sort of static rigid body right in max even though it's we don't have anything applied to it um we'll kind of show you what that means in a second but you can apply um other things in your scene to be static rigid body elements that let's say for instance if you wanted the dominoes to knock against something uh and not go any further right you can set up a static well we'll take a look at that in a minute so make sure this is set to dynamic and under your um shape type you can set it to box you can choose all kinds of different um shape types one thing to mention here is that mass effects doesn't do concave meshes or like uh it does but it it's a little tricky so we'll we can take a look at that in a minute as well um yeah so anyway so now that we have that set up what we can do is uh under uh our toolbar settings here you can turn on the mass effects toolbar and i just turned it off under your toolbar settings if you right click and you can do mass effects toolbar so you might not have that on by default if you have a fresh install of max but anyway so if we hit play nothing's going to happen right because we don't have anything to trigger this simulation right so if we hit play um cool nothing happens right our timeline is going but nothing happened so go back what we can do is like create like a little sphere that will knock into the first domino um and start the sort of chain reaction of events but we could just do this maybe we'll just like you know angle the first domino to kind of start to start the process moving right so we'll angle that one a little bit and then off we hit play we'll see what happens cool so it uh knocks them all over right um and we can hit and go back and um if we scrub nothing happens because we haven't like really done anything yet what we have to do is bake out the simulation so we go um under our little panel here right and we go to the little tools uh icon we could do is uh we can play the simulation [Music] right make sure it's what we want and then um we can uh do bake all so we hit bake all it's going to bake all the keyframes into each of the objects right and i mean obviously our timeline doesn't extend that far so we extend our timeline way out you know maybe to like 120. we can do unbake all too right so that's gonna remove all the animations that massfx specifically has applied to our objects right so we could do is um if we uh hit play again we'll just uh you can hit play uh this one which will um you know track the keyframes there which is pretty cool right and we go back and then we can do bake all again awesome so now we have a fully baked animation and all of our keyframes are applied to each one of these dominoes right so that's pretty neat so now it's no longer simulating and that's exactly what you would want if you're using mass effects it's exactly what you want to do we'll set this back to one before you go to render this thing out so before you if you were to render this out you would definitely want to bake your keyframes right bake all you can even choose specific things and bake selected or if you want but just know that if you if you want to do this the right way to do it to be bakehol right cool so that is one example um another example i have here is i i created this little uh pop up in my layers um it's a little like rude goldberg uh course right so i made this little uh course that we can um maybe drop a ball down this thing and see and see if it could uh we can make it in this little box right so what we could do is uh you know real quick i'll just model the sphere in here uh just toss one in there like that i'm gonna drag this up above our course there right and we can on the sphere we can apply um same thing a mass effects rigid body and this is going to be dynamic right and then under our shape type it automatically sets it to convex but we can just set this to sphere because it's a little bit more optimized right and then on all of these objects i've already applied a mass effects rigid body but i set all of them to static right remember we talked to be before about rigid body types so static isn't going to move that's just going to stay exactly where i put it see right now these are just kind of floating there right in space they're not going to be affected by gravity but they will be a part of the simulation and they will sort of like deflect the the ball as it's as it's you know falling and interacting with it right so now if we hit play we can just kind of see how this works cool so that's pretty neat right so we can go back um and we can uh we can just bake selected we can make the selected keyframes on just a little ball right awesome so now that we have that done so you can play with this until your heart's content i mean mass effects is really really fun it's very powerful um i would strongly recommend continuously saving your scene while you're working especially if you're doing anything with any of the simulation tools that are built into macs right mass effects or the cloth simulation and stuff like that uh that will that we'll look at next um macs can tend to be very crashy uh when you're doing things with uh physics simulations and stuff like that so just keep that in mind okay so last but not least we're going to be taking a look at the um cloth modifier the cloth simulation tools that max comes with right making cloth simulations is very easy um so we'll uh we'll take a look at this and it's it's very powerful there's a ton of stuff you can do right so i'll go ahead and toss a sphere in our scene and i'll lift it up into z so it's kind of floating there and then on top of the sphere i'm able to zero this out real quick just for uh i don't know why i just like keeping things a little bit consistent right um create a plane on top of our sphere make it about like that big we'll zero this out as well and we'll lift this up in the z that's probably fine and what we'll do is add a bunch of segments to this thing so um it'll like do like that much and maybe we'll just do like 50 by 50 right we can color our cloth like uh blue or something all right just so we can see it in comparison to the sphere and what we can do is on our cloth right we could just add a cloth modifier cool and here you can change all the simulation properties you can do change the gravity if you want to you take a look at these properties and kind of mess with stuff right and um what we really want to focus on is the object properties so click on object properties um this pulls up this dialog box here that you can uh modify some stuff so now what you can do is like this is our plane so what we could do before we do this we'll just name these things certain stuff like we could name this um blanket or something right and this will be our um we can just leave this as sphere right um so if we click on our cloth click on object properties now we know what the things are in our scene because we labeled them so our brilliant blanket is currently inactive so we want to set that to be cloth and we can choose a particular preset right so we can do like i don't know cotton right and we can adjust all of these different uh properties right the thickness there's like air resistance there's dynamic friction and static friction and all that stuff and there's different stretching properties you can make a really stretchy cloth if you want these are just the properties that are set up for like a sort of cotton based cloth right um yeah so here we can also add objects we can add different objects in our scene so we have our sphere so we'll click on our sphere and click add and so um our sphere is currently inactive so we have to choose it to be a collision object so we want the cloth to collide with it and that's pretty much all we have to do so we just click ok and then we can do uh click on simulate and depending on how many polys how many you know faces uh are how dense your mesh is um this could take a while to simulate right so our meshes was relatively dense right we could we could have reduced the amount of you know birdie season in our cloth and this would go a whole lot faster right so yeah that's pretty cool so i mean that looks pretty natural right for a cotton-based cloth right you can tell there's some like um self-collisions happening um which we can sort of like you know let's go pop this open object properties um we can give it a sort of thickness i don't think i'm going to do that in this video because it does take a whole lot longer to process but just know that you can play with that kind of thing um the cloth like my uh simulating cloth is especially with tyflo again with thai flow right is so much easier because it's multi-threaded and it's like what i mean by that is it it's uh you can basically run those kinds of calculations on your gpu right and it's so much more efficient to doing that doing it that way right because uh mass effects and the sort of cloth uh simulation tool set here runs on your cpu and it's it's just really uh sort of expensive to do it that way um so regardless of all that you can get sort of self collisions working really really well um with a tool set like thai flow you can still do it here with the cloth modifier but it's just just to know just just note that it's uh it is a little bit more tricky to get to get it to to work exactly like how you want right so anyway so that's our um blanket right and then we could what we could do is uh we can sort of do the same thing with a keyframe animation we can create keys it says cannot undo are you sure yep so basically that's just going to bake down our simulation to keyframes right so now we have our little animation here and i would definitely recommend again if you're going to render this thing out i would definitely recommend baking your key frames before you process your animation the reason why is because this is a simulation tool right and every time you run the simulation it could be slightly different now let's say for instance if you have a 300 frame long animation uh it would be like about 10 seconds right and then around halfway your computer crashes right or something or like if you send this file up to a server or something to like a render farm and it crashes for some reason right well the simulation could be slightly different um the second time you run the animation and you simulate it and you process the animation so you might notice uh some some weird jumps in your animation so you don't want that so always bake down your animation into keyframes and it'll save it in the file and if your computer crashes for whatever reason while it's processing the animation while you're you know processing your rendering of the animation you can always go back and resume exactly where you left off and no matter what the keyframes are baked so you could just no matter what it's always going to be exactly where you left off right anyway so we'll look at one more example for cloth um it's kind of fun so we'll just go ahead and like create a box here um just as a sort of floor plan or whatever you know and um we'll name this like ground and we create another box and we will let's create like a little couch cushion or something right so i'll show you like the sort of the way that you can inflate stuff um so in our box we could do is create a few segments here i don't want it to be too dense or else it'll take forever to process i just want to show you this so um you know maybe we could do like uh 30 by 40 um [Music] 10 you know something like that's fine okay so now with our little uh couch cushion created right um it will lift it up just a little bit so it's not sticking in the floor all right it's just like a couple centimeters or something um we'll go to our cloth uh modifier we'll toss a cloth modifier on this guy um object properties and you know what we'll name this pillow this one's pillow and this one's ground right object properties we'll add objects and we'll choose our ground all right so our ground is going to be the collision object and our pillow is going to be a cloth object of course preset i guess we can set it to cotton right it's a slightly heavier fabric but this should work just fine and down here you have a pressure setting right so pressure is like the amount that you want to inflate something right so you can do like um just try like at 30 for now right we'll just kind of see how this works um but just make sure that ground is collision and this one's set up and click ok and if we scroll down here a little bit yeah we hit simulate cool [Music] so we can cancel that and that looks pretty good right so it's inflating it and this is like a perfect way for you to make um couch cushions right and we can even inflate that even more if we wanted to so what we can do is uh erase simulation go back to the first keyframe we can lift this up just a little bit maybe i'll give it a little bit of a bounce to it object properties pillow um and we'll choose this to be like 100 right so we'll kind of blow it up like a balloon we'll hit on simulate yep so that's a very puffy pillow right so you can cancel that at any time we can always like go back through here and kind of like choose uh sort of keyframe that you like and if you really like the way this is looking or whatever um you can right click and convert that to an editable poly you know there's a couple different things you can do you can like grab a particular state or whatever um and uh you know keep the simulation live if you want or something you know you can always do whatever you want to create uh you know the the asset that you're the end goal right is a sort of pillow so with the cloth tool set it's great because you know now you have the power to create like fabric and cloth and stuff like that like if you're doing an architectural scene and you want to take like a if you model like a t-shirt or like a hoodie or something you can basically convert that to cloth right and then simulate it falling or draping over the edge of a chair or something you know and so like you can make your scenes a lot more dynamic by adding these little elements you know they don't really take very much time at all to simulate you know like depending on how you know dense your the mesh is right for uh let's say for a hoodie or something you might have a slightly higher dense uh density in your mesh it'll take longer to simulate but at least you know you have that tool set and it's really simple to use you kind of just toss on a modifier you position it where you want it to drape you hit simulate and goes you know it does does it right so um so yeah that's uh so that's cloth pretty cool huh okay everyone so if you stuck through the entire crash course an animation congratulations uh we covered a lot in this video right um obviously we weren't able to cover every single component of how to animate stuff we covered a lot of the basics right that was the idea for this crash course to just get you familiar with the general sort of like fundamental methods um that are used all the time for for creating animations right um so these are methods that i use all the time that i constantly refer to and i it's great to see them all sort of you know put together in one uh larger tutorial i know this is about almost an hour long so thank you guys so much for watching if you like the tutorial please hit the like button leave a comment down below of course for the youtube algorithm right let me know what you thought of this tutorial um of course if you guys have any suggestions on future tutorials let me know i'm looking to looking forward to making some more uh this year um got a brand new microphone so i'm looking forward to producing some better more high quality content for you guys right anyway thank you guys so much for watching talk to you soon bye

Channel: Simulation Lab

Views: 26,565

Keywords: 3ds max, tutorial, beginner, how to, 3d model, 3d, step by step, animation, rendering, simulation, massfx, cloth, rigging, car, easy

Id: ONSuPcRgqSs

Length: 60min 0sec (3600 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 01 2022