Animating 2500 objects easily

# 1 01-06-2003 , 01:06 AM

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Join Date: Oct 2002

Location: USA

Posts: 1,172

There's probably no way to do this, but I'll ask anyway.....

ok, Here's what I'm trying to do. I'm doing a 100 frame animation for a company name/logo that will play in the beginning of their animations sort of like the Warner Brothers logo or the 20th Century Fox things that play in the beginning of a movie.

I'll use a different name than the actual company. We'll call it "Digital Gateway." I have "Digital Gateway" in text in the scene. I have made it 3D text by extruding the faces outward as well. I selected all the faces for each letter and performed an extraction on each one seperating the faces when I did the operation. This slices each letter into about 200 seperate objects (individual faces) that, when put together, look like a letter. All together, this creates around 2,500 seperate objects.

To make things easy, I select all objects, go to frame 85, key the objects, go to frame 0, then key all objects behind the camera. This makes the Digital Gateway name animate from behind the camera to the front where it is visible and stops at frame 85.

Here's where it gets tricky. Instead of having all 2500 objects that make up the name Digital Gateway, I want some of those objects to go from behind the camera to their final place in the animation in a shorter time. Really, I want it all spread out so it looks as if the name Digital Gateway is being "created" really fast.

So far, I have just been selecting object by object and moving the last keyframe backwards a little, which works fine, but it takes too long for 2500 different objects. Is there any way to easily move the last keyframe of each object to a random frame between frame 1 and 85? or perhaps something else that would make this process go a little faster?

Thanks.

www.Darkware3D.com

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# 2 01-06-2003 , 02:08 AM

Registered User
Join Date: Sep 2002

Location: Minnesota, USA

Posts: 3,709

On Highend, there is a melscript that will do the work of this for you user added image

It is called RandKey

I cannot post it here, for legal reasons user added image

, but go there, and in the melscripts section, do a search for randkey , and you will find it user added image

Here is a blurb from the melscript header:

// randKey.mel v1.1 by Mikael Hakansson.
//
// This script brings up a window, which lets you randomize
// selected keyframes from the graph editor.
//
// It has two modes of randomization. The first mode is the 'offset mode'.
// The selected keyframes will be offset from their current position
// (in time and/or value) within the entered value.
//
// The second mode is the 'box mode'. It will randomize your selected
// keyframes to any time and position within a specified "box".
// For example in the time range 10 to 23, and value range -3 to 8.
// Much like PA's randomize, except that you enter the range values
// numerically, instead of drawing a box in the graph editor.
//
// In both modes there's the possibility to randomize only in time
// or value.
//
// To run the script, just put the script in ~/maya/scripts/
// and type 'randKey' from the command line.

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