vesti horses made of sticks

29Sep10

This open was made for Russian news program by Duler. He asked for my help with making of three running horses. The idea behind was that horses supposed to be made from thin and thick sticks and little digits.

Here is a making of.

First find somewhere an animated galloping horse, put it into 3dsmax, find the cycle interval and make a Point cached geometry (thanks polypixel!).

Then “detach” an animated head, tail and mane. This can be done by adding Mesh select and DeleteMesh modifiers after the Point cache modifier. The head is necessary for proper sticks density, tail and mane will be emitters for the digits.

Next make 6 Particle flow systems, 3 for head and 3 for body of each horse. Three systems needed for three different sizes of the sticks. Particles will be gradually born and disappear at the pads below horse’s body and head. Point a couple of thin and tall planes with a lot of height segments as a Shape Instances. For a better sticks animation use the Spin operator with huge Random value.

For a next operations with our particle systems we need to convert them into 3dsmax objects. Use the Mesher compound object for this, point appropriate PF systems and align the coordinates if needed.

Add the Vol.Select modifiers to select the only vertices on the outside of the horses. Then add the DeleteMesh modifier, and finally Shell and Push for the depth and overall width of the sticks.

Make the final run out of the sticks using the Noise modifier (before the Shell in the modifiers stack), rotate it’s Gizmo to fit the sticks orientation and set the animation by the height axis.

For the digits create 10 separate objects with the digits from 0 to 9, center their Pivots and Group. Make three PF systems for the tail, mane and other skin of the horses.

Point proper horse’s body parts as emitters, turn on Animated shape check-boxes, add to the Force operator some wind and kill all the particles afterward the birth within several frames.

As a bonus make the digits running by the horse’s skin surface.

Create two groups with several animated deflectors in them (one deflector for some reason doesn’t affect all the particles), so the deflectors fly through the horse. First group turns on the visibility of the particles-digits linked and oriented by horse’s skin surface. Second group kills particles.