Question - preferred setup for furniture props with drawers
Diomede
Posts: 15,079
Setting up a furniture prop. I am making a wall unit for a spaceship interior that is going to have several drawers and a bed that swings down from the ceiling like a train berth. In modeling, I can make the wall unit as a single mesh and have the drawers open and the berth swing by using morphs. Or, I can have the drawers and bed as separate objects and parent them, with movement constraints. What is the preferred arrangement?
Post edited by Chohole on
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Comments
I'm not a modeler, so perhaps this isn't a concern, but if you have the drawers open as morphs, wouldn't that stretch by many times and thus horibly distort any pattern on the material used (unless it's shader based)?
Also having drawers be separate allows them to be removed (could be strewn about the room, or even used as separate objects if for some reason you needed a loose drawer. Although I haven't had a need for one yet, just throwing out options.
Linear motions, such as drawers sliding open, can be handled by morphs - just make sure the whole drawer moves as a unit. However you will get odd rsults if you try to make a rotary motion with a morph - the item will shorten as it approaches the hallf-way point and then lengthen again. For those separate objects, or bones n a figure, are better.
It is much easier to work with if the moveable items like that are individual objects instead of just individual groups of the same object. So, separate them out and parent/rig them in your chosen application.
It's generally best to never use morphs for this kind of radical movement of what are, after all, individual objects. For instance, in some applications, depending upon the rigging, morphing the object to open a drawer or cabinet will cause the application to recalculate the entire object's center. ie: Open drawer with simple morph, object jumps two feet backwards... It's also not intuitive to use morphs for this and users would probably like the ability to hide the drawer, rotate it, etc. And, for animation, having it rigged/parented as a separate object is much more desirable as well.
Moved to the Commons because it is a question about, not an offer of, freebies.
In DS I'd make it a figure and rig it with bones. The drawers can be made to slide in and out that way, and the berth will swing. That wouldn't work in Carrara though - the translate motion for rigging isn't supported there (one reason why I think the pistons on bots are so troublesome). In Carrara I'd most likely make the parts separately, parent and constrain them. (if you export that parented prop, in DS the names of each individual vertex objects will become the face groups to which you attach the bones)
Attached shows a simple desk with three drawers, parented & constrained in carrara and rigged in DS.
Thanks, all. I know how I would set it up in Carrara or Poser. And I could save it to a Poser file structure and use in Carrara or Studio. But, I want to learn how to set it up for Studio as first choice. Appreciate the feedback. It won't be offered as a freebie until after I fail a couple of times rigging everything, Oh, and sorting out the Iray vs 3delight texture issues.