Day job project

[Gerry]

Here's something I 'm doing for my day job, a machine that creates rubber injection-molded components for high voltage uses.

 

I'm going to need to do versions where some components are hidden or turned off. Is it better to do that with an action or an on/off pose?

103203_Ric008IV_Step1Rotate_v2h264.mov

[John Bigboote]

I'd suppose an action... assemble everything together in various actions... one action would be 'ALL PARTS' another would be 'PARTS A, B, C..." If you did it in a pose, you would turn the transparency for a group to zero... which works well but has drawbacks- one being if you render with ambient occlusion the transparent items cause full occlusion.

[TheSpleen]

great stuff. How do you find jobs like this?

[Paul Forwood]

If there are not too many components you might find it just as easy to animate the "Active" property for each component in the choreography.

[Gerry]

It's my day job. We do litigation graphics and this one is a patent infringement suit over trade secrets on this injection process.

 

Litigation graphics is a big field and almost no one has ever heard it. I've done this sort of work for three different companies over the last ten years.

 

John, thanks for the clarification. I tried to do it in an on/off pose but immediately ran into trouble because I was hiding groups instead of changing transparency.

 

EDIT: Paul, I just saw yours. But I can't change the "active" setting for groups, can I? It would only work at the model level, right?

[robcat2075]

One alternative to hiding things with transparency is to hide them by scaling. Scale a part to 0% in a pose.

[pixelplucker]

Thats some nice modeling!

I used to do tons of mechanical models and animations for a customer of mine in the plastic injection mold business. Way back then we used 3ds Max and Electric Image. Never knew if AM was around in the mid-late 90's.

[itsjustme]

Great stuff, Gerry!

[largento]

Looks great, Gerry!

 

One thing I do to achieve that is to hide groups in the model window. (They'll disappear in the choreography window.) It's only a temporary thing, but it works for me (I frequently need to hide parts of things to accommodate the camera.)

[Gerry]

this is one of four final animations I did for this project. It goes a little fast because we did two versions, one that just plays through, and this one which is made to "step through" frame by frame with the arrow keys in a Flash presentation. But it's all modeled in A:M, with labeling in AfterEffects.

 

Hey Mark, your little trick came in very handy in hiding and showing elements to render the various stages.

103203_Ric008IV_Step4_h264.mov

[itsjustme]

That was great, Gerry!

[Paul Forwood]

Very well done!

Did you use booleans to fill those objects? It looks great whatever.

[Gerry]

Thanks for the comments!

 

In three of the four animations, I had to show melted rubber material flowing down the thin "runners" and filling the mold. For the runners I used an animated material, then for the mold fill I used a Boolean cutter. for the cutaways I also used Booleans.