Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
In the last movie, we actually concluded this tutorial series as all pieces had fallen into place.
This bonus round if you will, wasn't planned but I couldn't resist showing you this last bit of script that Martin Ashton recently cooked up.
As mentioned before, Martin is our in-house script guru and often designs and codes fun scripts sometime between breakfast and morning coffee.
You can learn more about Martin's work by visiting the Autodesk Scripting and SDK Learning Channel
Here, he came up with this idea of animating the scale values of the various elements that make up a building in Building Maker.
I thought you may find it useful, and so I will demo the tool for you.
For that, I'll use the same file we used before, the scene named: CityBlocks_Bldgs-cam.max
This is the same scene we used earlier, right before we created the park on that empty lot in the center.
This time, I'll use this lot to create a building that's loosely based on the Empire State Building.
I won't worry about textures this time around, just the volumes.
For that, I'll start by merging in a file that contains simple rectangular 2D shapes.
The file name is Empire.max and it contains six shapes. They will get placed in the right spot.
And so, I'll fire up Building Maker and create Levels and Elements based on these shapes, using the workflow you have learned about.
As mentioned a moment ago, I won't worry about textures, only volume heights and bevels where needed.
Once I have the building created, all I need to do is select the building base, usually named Level001,
and simply run the AnimateGrowth.ms script that's part of the archive you downloaded for this tutorial.
Let may playback the animation so you can see the results.
The animation is not long enough, so I'll adjust its length in the Time Configuration dialog.
For the purposes of this demo, I will also ensure that all building elements are capped.
There, quite a fun little bonus tool and so easy to set up.
By default, the growth timing for each individual element is 30 frames, but you can change that in the script if you want to.
I'll leave the 30-frame default; I find that it works rather well.
That's it! I hope you liked it.
We'll be coming back with other goodies very soon.