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Author Topic: help needed for RailClone Masters, please...  (Read 5520 times)

naxos

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help needed for RailClone Masters, please...
« on: March 07, 2014, 09:45:27 PM »
Hello,
I've made a RailClone Item to create some venetian store using some parameters, and it works fine (my second RC test ;-)
But, i'd like to be able to change some parameters : Orientation of the blind blades, and to open the store...

- For the orientation, i've put a numeric to set the Zrotation of the elements : it works until +-40°... after that, everything gets offsetted, i guess it is because the bounding box are then overlaping, so the evenly count is modifyed...
> is there any way to prevent that ?

- For opening the blind blades, in real life the distance between the blades goes from 10cm to 1cm...
Of course, if i change the evenly distance, i go from 20 blades to 200...
> is there anyway to limit that ?
> i thought to use a complex X (or Y ?) translation, wired to a numeric parameter to set..., but the use of evenly prevent us to know how many blades there will be (regardless of the X size of the blind...)

Here is a scene with my RC object, please feel free to look at it, and thank in advance if you find a good way to make it better...
In case of success, i'll post it in forum or i'll let you use it for RC libraries... if you want to, of course...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6669502/forums/StoreVenitien.rar

Best regards.

Paul Roberts

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Re: help needed for RailClone Masters, please...
« Reply #1 on: March 08, 2014, 01:31:37 PM »
Hi,

Thanks for the questions and the files - it's a great use of RailClone.

Quote
- For the orientation, i've put a numeric to set the Zrotation of the elements : it works until +-40°... after that, everything gets offsetted, i guess it is because the bounding box are then overlaping, so the evenly count is modifyed... is there any way to prevent that ?

You're correct, at a certain point the bounding boxes will overlap and push the segment's apart. To stop this happening you can add a negative left/right padding value to all the segments. They can then overlap without being displaced.

Quote
- For opening the blind blades, in real life the distance between the blades goes from 10cm to 1cm...
Of course, if i change the evenly distance, i go from 20 blades to 200...
is there anyway to limit that ?

To resolve try the following for each segment used in the blind's louvres.
  • Determine the number of vertical louvres for a given length by dividing it by the Evenly distance. I needed to account for the spaces between the louvres hence it's actually half the evenly distance - 5cm in this case.
  • Create a new conditional operator and turn on X Counter and select Less, export Segment X Counter and wire it to value in the previous step.   This will limit the number of louvres that can appear
  • Wire one of the blind segments into the true input - leave the false input empty and then conditional node's output into the Evenly slot of the generator.

Here's a screengrab of this section:



You should now be able to adjust the evenly value of the generators to open and close the blind. In the file attached I've also turned off justified for the evenly mode so that it would animate smoothly.

Here's the file if you'd like to check it out - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/218877678/iToo/support15rev1.max

Hope that helps.

Many thanks,

Paul

« Last Edit: March 08, 2014, 01:34:02 PM by Paul Roberts »
Paul Roberts
iToo Software

naxos

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Re: help needed for RailClone Masters, please...
« Reply #2 on: March 10, 2014, 11:12:14 PM »
Great ! Many thanks...

To get this perfect it will need another kind of stuff :
a small balls chain that goes from vertical louvres to another, at the bottom of them...

Really not sure if it is possible, even for rotation and for opening...

maybe i should try to surface-attach nodes to the parts and to dynamically create a rope from them, using MassFX...
I don't know...

For the rotation effect, it is i think more easy : but we need to convert some rotation angle to some complex X & Y movement...
For the opening, we could use a one-dir scale, but the little spheres would be flatten...



Paul Roberts

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Re: help needed for RailClone Masters, please...
« Reply #3 on: March 11, 2014, 03:54:51 PM »
Hi,

Check out the attached file. When fully open the chains with balls should rotate to follow the louvres. They do scale when the blind is closed too, but as you pointed out this deforms the balls in fairly unnatural ways.  I can't really think of a way around that in RailClone at the moment. As a compromise you could do something similar but with the chain in a straight line instead of a series of curves.

To calculate the XY movement of the chains I used the Sin and Cos functions found in expressions option of the Arithmetic operator.

Here's the file  - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/218877678/iToo/support15rev2.max. The generators I've added are at the bottom of the node tree.

Hope that helps,

Thanks,

Paul

Paul Roberts
iToo Software

naxos

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Re: help needed for RailClone Masters, please...
« Reply #4 on: March 12, 2014, 07:36:26 AM »
Waoh ! Genius !

I was thinking about some sin / cos stuff, but i was far from make it work (my maths courses are quite far away now)...

I'll defenetelly recomand RC to my friends : a great tool and a great support !

Many thanks !