The last couple of days I have been looking at Newton, and learning a bit more about it. I took the Troll projectfile as a start and replaced it with my own model. I wanted to texture the wall, but since it was built up by a single brick model in the chor I had to read a bit more about the plug-in. Anyway, I had to rebuild the wall completely, and rig every single brick, but now I am able to texture the wall:) Anyway, here is my test, nothing fancy though. By the way. The character is "Static With Action" while the wall is "Dynamic Breakable Explodeobject"

Click to view attachment

That's awesome Stian. Can't wait to see what you have in mind for this. I'm sure it's going to be pretty amazing/

Looks really good Stian. It would make a great intro in some A:M web publicity.
I like your run cycle action too. Great work!

Michel

Ther is a "brick" plugin too avaible Download

Yeah, I have used the brick plugin in earlier tests and it is brilliant! But as I understand it only stack as single model (a brick) multiple times in the chor. In this test I wanted to texture the wall with a single image covering the whole wall, which Is impossible when the wall consist of a single brick model, thats why I had to build the wall manually in the objectwindow. Please correct me if I'm wrong

The only thing better than seeing your detailed modeling is seeing your detailed models animated!
Wonderful.

now add some sprite dust etc

There is a simple trick :-)
The single brick should have a group and a bone . Than build the wall with the brick plugin , export the chor as mdl , import this created model, delete the unneeded groundplane in this model and now the most time consuming part ,
rename the bones to Explode_xxxx and the correspondending groups to Explode_xxxx , now You have a single wall model , that can be used as Dynamic Breakable Explodeobject .

I thought of that idea, and tried it (using the troll project).. But I rejected that idea because it did not preserve the bones... of course there was a reason for that.... I just figured out... because the brick did not have a bone in the first place! I feel stupid now Thanks for making me aware of that! I wouldn't have figured that out if it wasn't for your post... Glad I didn't start a new project using the manual method. Thanks! you saved me a lot of time

Hey all,

I'm trying to create a project like agep.

however, I get error when trying to run simulate. I've got all the bricks in place and bone to 0,0,0. I tried it with a simple object to penetrate the wall and that worked. I believe it is because the object had just the root bone.

Now, I am trying to use a running man model. I've followed the suggests here to recreate the same thing...running man thru a wall.

However, I get an error, but it is just error message with Yellow triangle warning, no words as to what error is. I believe it has to do with the running man model having lots of bones. I set root to 0,0,0. but, still getting error.

Is there something that needs to be done with the bones of the running man model? In John Bigboote's comic PDF tutorial, it says to delete all bones but root. Wondering if that's what needs to be done to running man model. If so, then how to make running man run? hmmmm

Thanks for any suggestions.

Getouta the way hes comming through, haha thats graet ,nice work

Hey Ernest- Yeah- I was saying to delete all bones in that instance...this is different. Did you set the Newton properties correctly for the 'running man' model? Should be:

Plugin Properties/Newton Dynamics/Use in Sim=ON/Use As=Static With Action... (?) I put the question mark because I am not sure... hopefully Stian will be able to clarify. OR- experiment with the other settings.

Yes, I used Static with Action. I'm wondering if the root bone needs to be moved. Right now it is resting at the feet level. I'll play around with it.

I'm also wondering if running man needs to be animated by hand. I have him constrained to a path and a running Action applied.

Before, with the missile through the brick wall, I just hand animated a start and end position and it worked. But, again it only had the root bone, no others.

I deleted the path constraint and Action and then, hand animated the running man. Still not working and get the same wordless error and have to close program. argh

Did you do what Stian said he did above...?

By the way. The character is "Static With Action" while the wall is "Dynamic Breakable Explodeobject"

Yes, I had the character as Static with Action. I'm currently playing around with all this. Any comments are welcome as I am checking forums for all kinds of hints and tips.

I just used the brick wizard (what a joy!). So I can build walls rather quickly. Just don't forget to set the Ground as a Static Object or the bricks just fall through. hehe

I am able to get one object or model to plow through the wall. But, again, it's just the model with a root bone centered at 0,0,0. No character model so far.

Ok, I noticed that when building the wall of bricks, it was too low. So, I would scale my running man down to match.

I read in the forums that Newton likes things to been scaled at 100%. This fixed getting the error. However, now my man just goes through the wall without knocking down the bricks.

I checked the brick model and it's only allowing me to select Dynamic Object. I change to Dynamic ExplodeObject or Dynamic Breakable ExplodeObject, but it reverts back to Dynamic Object. However, I can chose any of the other Use As options, and it holds onto those. hmmmm. Getting closer.

Still working on this. However, still unable to getting running man choregraphed to interactive with blocks.

I have the same situation. I want to decal the wall. I found a zippy bingo fast and speedy fixaroo for renaming the bones and groups in the exported wall model from a choreography. Takes seconds.

I am using jEdit, which is a free open source text editor but you can use anything that has regular expression search and can save as plain text.

Open the model file in jEdit (or whatever). Find the name of one of the bones or groups in the model file text. When I did this with AM it named all the bones of each placed brick like this:



I used the cube primitive from the library, so the extra bone was already there and it is named "COG" for some reason. That name is repeated exactly the same way for x number of times for each brick. It's always the same only the NUMBER changes.

The groups are named like this:



I named the group "brick1" in the original brick model.

To easily and quickly change the names of all the bones and preserve the number in my file I used this for my search pattern (make sure you check the "regex" or regular expression button in whatever program you use).



The important bit is the area around the number of the bone. The first set or "outer" set of parentheses are part of the text itself so should be "escaped" by using the back slash in front of them \( and \). The second set of parentheses are for CAPTURING the found number which is 1 or more digits from 0-9. ([0-9]+). The + sign indicates 1 or more of what is inside the brackets. 0-9 is a range, like a-z or 6-9 etc. So it will find ANY pattern of numbers inside parentheses.

The inner set of parentheses captures this series of numbers and "saves" it for replacing.

This is the replacement pattern I used:



I've replaced the whole found text with "brick_" and "$1". In jEdit the $ followed by a digit "1" in this case indicates the first saved capture or the first thing wrapped in (). You can have as many of those () as you want $1 $2 $3 etc, and use them in the replacement.

So I hit replace all with this set up in my search and replace in jEdit and every instance of the name:



Is changed to:



Now I repeat but change it to the name of the group...



In a matter of seconds I changed the names of over 150 bones and groups in my brick wall model. Each bone and group is numbered correctly and uniquely. No chance of user error.

Any questions feel free to ask. Like I said many applications use different forms of regular expression search patterns. These work for jEdit.

[edit] you may have to change the name of the first shortcut or instance in the chor "model". It doesn't have a number added to it and the search and replace won't find those names. You could however modify the name of the shortcut in the chor to match the others before saving as a model so the search and replace works for all the bones and groups.

-vern

OOPS!

I didn't realize you needed to use "Explode_xxx" for the name of the bones and groups! I thought it was "just a suggestion"... anyway... took two seconds to fix with a text editor.

-vern