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Unfolding an Audi

The idea for the creation of this animation came to me from a Motorola ad in which an apartment transforms into a cell phone. Any attempts to find detailed information about the production of the movie ended at best with a link to a SIDEFX webpage.

Click on any pictures to enlarge or play the clip

The pipeline for this tutorial (Maya (modeling) -> Max (cutting) -> Maya (animating) -> Max (rendering)) may seem a bit strange. This can be accomplished without using 3ds Max, if you do R&D, but for the purposes of this project, we will use everyday tools. There is a nice plugin called Deconstructor, which does what we need for this project, but it was created for use with 3ds Max only. In the process of working with Deconstructor, some problems were discovered. Before starting the cutting process, you need to use a modifier shell, otherwise some parts of the cut geometry will have "inappropriate internal" walls.

Here is an example

It took 30 minutes to create a simple animation of parts moving in different directions. This test stage was made in order to run the mechanism and find ways to streamline and expedite the process of animation in subsequent versions.













I took the model of a car from an old project and separated the layers into parts (16 total)

Exporting the parts one by one in *obj* format, we will cut the following: body, engine compartment, bottom, glass and the inner lining. The remaining details will be animated without cutting into pieces.

Each file is then loaded into 3ds Max and we take the following steps shown in the pictures. Don’t forget to use a shell modifier and “collapse all” in editable mesh.

The modificator must be divided in the square areas in two planes, otherwise they will be arched. After this is completed, we hide layers using uncut pieces


Click on any pictures to enlarge it