Help! Generating spheres; preset diameters, names, and possibly colors.

Submitted by fluffmachine on Tue, 2015-02-03 21:00

Hi All,

I have a question about Maxscript that I just can't seem to figure out on my own so i'm turning to the experts!

I'm currently creating a Solar System animation in Max and AE. I'm starting in Max by creating all the celestial bodies. Initially I created the 9 planets but then I thought it would be even better to have 400+ other bodies like asteroids, comets, dwarf planets, moons and others in there too. Creating one sphere at a time is...well, less than ideal so I'd like to know if there is a script I can create (or maybe something similar exists) that would pull info from a .txt or excel file. I have all the data in Excel right now.

Thanks in advance.

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pixamoon's picture
Submitted by pixamoon on Fri, 2015-02-06 08:41.

animation

Do you have animation data in the file too ? Orbits, speed, location ? Do you want to create whole animation in one click ? :)

pixamoon's picture
Submitted by pixamoon on Fri, 2015-02-06 04:46.

sure

Hey,

You can export Excel to CSV or txt with csv structure. Then read it with the simple script. Please see attached.

How CSV should look:
Every planet in single line. Every value separated with "|" character.

for eg: (name|radius|x|y|z|sphere segments)

Sun|20|0|0|0|12
Earth|2|100|100|0|12

And so on.

If you need apply specific colors then add extra 3 numbers controlling rgb (egz |0|10|200)

Hope it helps.

AttachmentSize
read_data_from_csv.ms 361 bytes
solarsystem2.txt 39 bytes

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