Questions about 3Ds max from an amateur

[Karkadann]

Has any one figured out how produce a plane at a 90 degree angle, so you can walk up the wall.

I can walk on the XY plane but the XZ and the YZ plane still have me stumped

[Sirich]

Has any one figured out how produce a plane at a 90 degree angle, so you can walk up the wall.

it is do-able, but difficult.
D'lanor posted a proof of concept age Here.

[Aloys]

That proof-of-concept worked decently as far as the avatar control goes, and that was quite fun, IIRC what was a little more problematic was the camera. If I understood correctly we have no way to change that though.

[Karkadann]

So does any one know how to produce a YZ and a XZ plane you can walk on as easily as you can walk on the XY plane in 3D studio max and would be willing to explain it?

[Jojon]

I have been wondering where, how and when you intend to have the transitions between different plane orientations.

Enter one door and reappear through another, in another orientation, or what? Have the avatar put one foot onto a wall and stepping right onto it? (implying need for a custom avatar animation). Twisting pathways?

Is the camera meant to follow the avatar around, or should we see ourselves walking upside-down?


One way is to use so called "subworlds". These are "simply" the locking of your avatar coordinates, to the coordinate system of another object, instead of directly to the world one. This is commonly used for vehicles; move the subworld (vehicle) and the avatar will move with it (without having to calculate transfer of momentum, or any other physics -- your position is simply relative to the subworld object's origo). These allow you to have "down" in whichever direction you wish (you'll warp around right away, upon switching to the subworld) and each have their own sets of colliders, so that it is e.g. possible to walk through a wall while in the reference space of one subworld, but not in another, if you leave that wall out of the one's collider mesh.
For a good example of subworlds, with source (.blend fle), you could look at the NadnerB's "AnimatedDoor" example age, here: http://www.guildofwriters.com/wiki/Animations.
It has a platform, which you can step onto and click on, at which point it will travel up, turning over as it goes, leaving you literally standing on the ceiling. (Don't step off the platform at this point. Doing so will trigger your leaving the subworld and you'll return to the world coordsys.)
More about subworlds at: http://www.guildofwriters.com/wiki/SubWorlds
You could easily trigger a subworld shift, using a "region" (an invisible volume, which can trigger any sequence of actions, upon entering or leaving it), placed right in front of a wall, optionally with an extra conditional that the avatar must be facing the wall, for the transition to occur, in case you don't want it to make the switch if the player backs or sidles up to it, or to avoid any possible risk of getting into infinite loops of the avatar stepping on-off-on-off-etc...

If you wish to be "extreme" you could rotate the entire world, so that down is always down... :)

EDIT1: Hmm, I see others had already said the same things I just did... :D

EDIT2: I notice that one of the "oneshot" avatar animations available to us is the "jump up on the spot" one. You could potentially use this for subworld transitions, if you move the avatar into an intermediate subworld and animates that subworld (rotating 90 degrees and, if necessary, translating it a bit) while the avatar is airborne -- it might actually look half decent; you jump up, rotate in the air and land on the wall...
(Done exacly this way, one might get mutiplayer issues, mind, with the player "taking another player along for the ride").

EDIT3: Incidently, I had a similar idea, back when the first age contest was held. Its rules stipulated that the age should be a maximum of so-and-so many blender units, cube, in size, which led me to the concept of an age literally consisting of a Blender grey view grid; three intersecting planes, exactly as large as the rules stated, giving you eight separated sections to visit, in different (dis)orientations. You'd need to travel between all these, with the help of various representations of Blender tools (like e.g. size yourself down to get through a small hole), until you got to the delicious cake at the centre, visible from all, but reachable only from one of the planes. :P

EDIT500: ...one more revision... *moves misplaced comment* ..ok... think I can go to bed now.. :P

[Karkadann]

What I had planned on is walking from the floor of the XY plane to the floor of the XZ or YZ plane. basically walking across the floor and up the wall. This way if it where to be used on a shard or Uru Live you could have several AV's all on different planes at ninety degrees from each other like people in Escher's Relativity sketch. Also I think it would be best if the camara folow the AV so you dont see your self upsidown but you might see others upsidown Although if and when I do figure this out before some one else that has my Relativity.max file I think their may be some problems with the third person view, and some of the stairs because they are double sided. If you look at the sketch you will notice that some of the people are walking on both sides of the stair case(top and bottom) and in addition they are at a ninety degree angle from each other. It sounds complex especially for an amateur. Which is why I released it to the public, in hopes that If I can not figure it out for drizzle distribution and Uru live some one else might.

[Jojon]

Well, /me, for one, can't do anything with a max file, but I can imagine what you have in mind.

Maybe it couldn't look too strange, with the vanilla walking animation, if one walk all the way up to the floor/wall corner and just turn there.. It could probably work - we swallow it for walking up/down stairs after all... :)

Players clipping eachother may be an issue... :7


EDIT: An animated camera (even without any actual IPO curves) will retain its orientation, rather than level with the world, so maybe a set of fixed position cameras would be a decent way to go about the third person issue? Carefully placed, they could be better than the avatar follow camera, since they could potentially give a good overview of the age and the people traversing it...

EDIT2: Actually, it turns out that setting the "Animated" flag on an avatar camera, locks its rotation, too, just like with the simple ones, so I think we're all set... :)

Ok... 02:00.. Wish me luck getting up for work in three hours.. :P

[Karkadann]

First GO TO SLEEP. when you wake up and get back from work I was gonna ask if it would be any easer to have one link in point for each plane and have them in the same age but some kind of invisible wall between them

in the mean time Good luck and good night

[Jojon]

Yaaaawwwwwwnnn... Man it's good to sleep... Oh dear, look at the time. :P

Hmm, you could certainly warp the player around, if indeed "just" rotating the avatar, is enough to make it fall in the direction its feet are pointing (does this affect cameras too? Don't know - if not, respawning at a link-in point probably would and I'm guessing one can probably instant-spawn, within an age (...as long as we don't call it linking ;)))

The problem there lies in the transitions. The way I understood it, you wanted to be able to move smoothly from one plane to the other, but spawnpoints are at fixed positions, so you'd need to use a seekpoint, to make the avatar automatically walk up to the spot, taking control from the player, like these things always do, and then respawn right in the same place, A'Gaeris style. ;)

If you don't mind some "teleporting" from plane to plane, things gets much easier, of course. :7


Right now, I'm pondering the viability of using Python scripting, to periodically adjust the rotation of the avatar, depending on the distance from its feet (is the skeleton root bone there?) to points, or lines, placed at plane corners. If possible, that could actually produce almost perfectly smooth transitions (..although heavy on run-time script usage), Psychonauts style (if you've played that crazy level-layout game).

[Karkadann]

Well I decided to go back to an earlier DWG file (before I made it all one piece) and started to prepare it for Max. Lots of editing and cleaning up, (whata mess now I know why I assembled the whole thing into one piece.) I have all of the walls floors and stairs separate so I can work with them a bit easer. It looks a bit different, more room to wonder and Im gonna try to incorporate a few glitches too. Since I cant do the sub worlds until drizzle 25 comes out Im gonna start to add texture and the UV map stuff while I wait. Should be interesting, wish me luck

edit to add

OMFG 113 objects I think I bit off more then I can chew, perhaps I'll just gnaw on it for a while