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# 42 20-08-2011 , 08:23 AM
Nilla's Avatar
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Join Date: Jun 2009
Location: Prague
Posts: 827

Fair enough. So how about this... a tut that will do something complex like what I mentioned, but done like a professional studio would do it - all scripted and driven, as J said.

My ulterior motive is, (you guessed it), I'm trying to make a complex sim with many moving parts, with each part's behavior relying on another part further up the "chain", if you will. About a week has passed since I posted the original tut suggestion, and I've since successfully made the sim with scripting and animation clips. It was all a crash course for me, but I learned a TON! Lots of research, reading the docs, trial and error, etc. My only saving grace was that I'm already a programmer so it didn't take me long to start banging out scripts to control everything.

BUT!... I'm still a Maya n00b, and as such, I'm really left wondering if I did it 'right', or if the way I did it is the most inefficient, newbie mess as ever there was. user added image I'll be doing a lot more of this kind of simulation from here on, so if I could see how it's done by a real pro, I'm positive that it would dramatically improve my workflow.

Anyway, I know it's a lot to ask. Thanks for the chance to make a suggestion!

Hi danielames, check this out because I think you'll found it interesting and I just spent seven minutes finding it for you user added image

https://graphics.pixar.com/library/An...Cook/paper.pdf

In chapter 1 there's a lot of information about how they went about simulating vegetables and garbage, and it's quite fascinating how much time and how many people work on something most people would never think there was much to when they went to the cinema. This is Pixar of course and the budget is huge, but the point here is that both small and large studios will find custom solutions to complex simulations so there is no industry right way to do it, it's what works best and renders faster. Also Maya is used for film and tv so accuracy is not so important, if you were doing this for a car manufacturer that wanted it to be exact you'd be using cad based software or something else.

If you post up your work in the WIP section you'll probably get some good tips from other people in terms of workflow as it's more specific.