Egg Maker (A rigged Egg with scripting)

Egg Maker 0.7

This script is for making an Egg or many and then animate it so EASY.

Avoiding collitions, nice shape and nice motion. Without reactor and in real time.
It includes a “How to do”, for learning about applied quaternion and analytic geometry  in animation.

So useful for making animations with eggs; before this, making an animation of an egg was a complex, boring and long lasting process.

This is my first script in this site. It was made for my animation class.

First, you have to download and install The Egg Maker 0.7 from this site. You should select the 3ds max’s installation folder. The script will work after close it and open it again.  (Default folder is 3ds max 2010 but you could change it, 2010 it’s not necessary)

Then the script should be loaded. Right Click over a tool bar and click on Customize, select Toolbars then the option “Egg” in the Category and the script “EggB” will be displayed, after that drag and drop the icon in a toolbar and it’s ready for being used.

For making a simple Egg , you just have to specify the size and the number of parts (this is the subdivision of the poly)  and click on “Create Egg”. This is not useful; you can use this egg for decorating a scene.  Width is for the radius of the egg in the middle and in the top part, and Height is for controlling the upper part of the egg.

The most useful part of the script is the “Rigged Egg”, for creating it; you should follow the same steps for creating a simple egg.  (Click on “Create Rigged Egg”)

For making a simple animation it’s just necessary to put the dummy of the rigged egg in one point, and then go to another frame and move it (with auto-key on) or use path constraint. And a simple animation was created.  The egg will rotate and move in Z axis by itself. (See the first tutorial on YouTube, links at bottom).

That was good for simple animations in a plane. But you can use the egg for harder terrains. If you know how to use rays in maxscript, especially in position script, you won’t have problems with this topic.

If you don’t know how to use rays:

           dependsOn $Ray01
          (
           rayo = $Ray01
           rayo = rayo as ray
           ter = $Terrain01
           col = intersectRay ter rayo
           if not (col == undefined) then
                          col.position
           else
                           [0,0,0]
           )

It is a little code that I used in the Tutorial 2(see the video) you should copy in your dummy. (Ray01 is a Helper Tape and Terrain01 is just a plane with many modifiers)

And after applying the ray, you can see that in the last frames the script is slow. For avoiding this problem, you can use the cache memory in the main window of the script.

For using it, you have to select the Egg (not the dummy) and press “Read or create Cache” and a file with the name of the object will be created with memb extension.  (The default folder is the scenes’ folder, but you can change it when you want, press “Folder” button, just remember to select this folder every time you open 3ds max and want to use this egg, I prefer to use the default folder). You can see the path of the file by pressing “Print File Name” (it’s a good idea for checking that everything is fine). After that (with the egg selected) you should press “Renew Cache” and the cache will be ready for being used and now you can move through the time line without problem. Try to avoid “play animation” button, it can crash your Max. Use , and . it’s almost the same.

You can see what you can do with this script in the Demos that I put and learn how to use the script in the 2 tutorials.

The demos do not pretend to be realistic. Two demos simulate an egg moved by itself and other is basic collision.

The code is commented.