Week 10 - Reactor

In this week's tutorial we were introduced to the Reactor physics engine in 3DS Max and rigid body collections. To practice using the techniques, we had to animate a bowling alley so that the ball knocked over the pins at the end as realistically as possible.

The bowling alley model had already been created for this tutorial, so to start with I placed a rigid body collection helper into the scene. I then had to add all of the objects in the scene into the rigid body collection. Once this was done, I could change the properties in the Reactor panel. The lane was given a mass of 0 so that it would not move with gravity. The bowling ball was given a mass of about 0.2 whilst the pins had to be lighter - around 0.1.

The next step was to make the bowling ball move towards the pins as if somebody had thrown it. To achieve this, I added a keyframe on frame 5 and moved the bowling ball a bit further forward and slightly left and also rotating it a little. The ball will now move forwards and fall onto the alley due to the gravity from Reactor. The spin caused from the rotation makes it look more realistic.

The only thing left to do now in order to make the animation look as realistic as possible was to add materials - a wooden material for the alley, a glossy red for the ball and white for the pins. When it came to creating the animation in the Reactor panel, I set the starting frame to 2. This is necessary so that the ball doesn't just drop straight down and moves towards the pins.

Upon rendering, I could see how realistic the animation looked and I am very pleased with the results from this tutorial. This is one technique that will definitely be very useful in my final assignment animation. And what's more - my throw in the bowling alley animation scored me a STRIKE!