Box's Are Falling

This post will be about using the reactor tool within 3Ds Max and to start with making a simple box fall to the floor, without animating it using set key or auto key animation techniques.

I have never used this technique before and this is all new to me, but it has shown me you can animate models easier without having to do it all manually and that makes it more time consuming, however using the reactor with the software it does it all for you, (in a matter of speaking).

As mentioned this post is going showing a simple box falling to the floor, however in the next post I will attempt to create another animation with a demonstration of bowling.

Anyway on with this small animation, first you need to create a floor, which I have used a box but a slim one. Then created another box that will be raised and dropped from a height. Once these are in place you need to introduce the reactor, which is done by selecting animation, reactor, create object, then 'Rigid Body Collection'.

This is how to access the rigid body collection.

Then you need to click on the rigid body collection and click the modifier tab and then add the box and the floor to the collection by using pick or add. Once this is done we have to create the animation which is done by clicking the utilities tab near the modifier tab and choosing reactor. The expand the tab that says preview and animation, then click preview in window this will show you the animation in a preview window and show you what it looks like before you want your final version. You can also edit other properties in the utilities tab such as mass of the box making it fall faster.

This is just showing where to look in order to change other properties of models in the reactor.

Once you have followed these steps you should hopefully have a box that falls onto a floor.