Sjack Abeling Gravity Wheel and the Worlds first Weight Power Plant

[Omnibus]

@Jubjub,

The way I depict motion in 3Dmax is by indicating a trajectory along which the body should travel and then letting the program calculate how the body should look like at each point of that trajectory. It can be any trajectory, even a physically un-realistic one such as, say, water running uphill. It’s like drawing a cartoon. I know of no way in 3DMax to have a, say, stone fall to the ground under its own weight, if the trajectory of this fall isn’t assigned ahead of time. In other words, as far s I know, there’s no way to do what wm2d does â€" solve the equations of motion for a body at given initial conditions and represent graphically these solutions. If what you’ve done in 3Dmax isn’t doing that then it’s just an illustration of something desired but not necessarily physically consistent such as the models with the attached motor @Cherryman was showing, or in 3D the models @tao was showing of Torbay device. I hope I’m wrong and 3Dmax can do also real life simulations showing the natural path of motion.

[Jubjub]

I'm using 3ds max - A 30-day trial can be downloaded from http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?id=5659302&siteID=123112

I have uploaded my max-file to http://rapidshare.com/files/227559769/GravEng08_1.max (It's for Max 2009 and later)

@Omnibus,

You are both right and wrong about the whole trajectory thing.
If you model a a stone with a given weight, an unyielding groundplane, add some gravity and use max's Reactor to simulate the whole thing, the stone will drop to the ground (and bounce around depending of the amount of elasticity, friction and general surface shape).
However if you want to create a scene with a football penetrating a window you would set the animation up as you stated.
Something like animating the ball over 10 frames, and then let the physics system take over.

I've been using Max for more than 10 years, so I believe I've got the hang of it over the years. (My job is creating commercials, and visual effects for video and movies - how cool is that?  )

[erickdt]

Hi Jubjub,

I too have been using MAX for several years for design visualization. Despite this, I've never been able to get reactor to work right. It always just "explodes" the objects in the system all over the place. Do you have any idea how to fix this?

E

[Omnibus]

@Jubjub,

So, what you're showing us is a natural behavior of the device, just like the the natural fall of the stone let go from some height w/ respect to ground? It isn't motion along a predetermined trajectory, correct? If that's the case then it's most interesting to discuss this further and see whether or not there might be hidden problems. Recall how many times we had working models in wm2d only to find out there might be something problematic with them.

[erickdt]

If you create a reactor object with no trajectory (via. moving it from one position to another after moving the frame time) it will simply fall, endlessly if there's no ground plane...