Loft object animated - experiment

Hi, peep

In my continuous quest of mastering max and playing with unpopular or newly found tools to me, here's what I came upon this day. I am still learning the compound objects and now struggle with Loft. Have anyone of you here been using lofting as a method of modeling some stuff? I found it pretty interesting. Here is stuff I would like to share. Experimented if there is a way of animating lofted objects without converting them to mesh and there is a way. See attachments - one is video and one is screengrab.
There is involved a little trick if you want to animate loft object at its base level by - you have to go inside Loft in Modify panel, choose shape sub-category, select shape of your interest in loft object and click "Put" in shape commands rollout. Than max will ask whether create copy or instance of shape - choose instance and now by controling the instanced shape, animating its scale, animating vertices it is also applied to its instance inside loft object.
Limit is though that by animating rotation of whole instanced shape doesn't "counts". It is like you must animate either vertices, apply to them modifiers or you can animate base parameters of shape (if it wasn't converted into spline). Don't know yet if there is a work arounds to take total control but with mixture of rigging, parameter wiring I guess it is again a wast field of possibilities.

So, guess maybe some of you will find it usefull. My examples maybe are bit abstract but they should give some idea. In my example I animated two vertices of "path-shape" and also applied Flex modifier to them.

I can see how this approach maybe could be usefull for making and animating some tentackle stuff or some weird other planets organic plants or creatures, organisms. Would be interesting to hear what others think. Does anybody use Lofts in their workflow?

Hey Intars !!!

Are you going trough the Max bible Never tried out the loft object myself but i guess it should be a good and easy way to animate some kind of tentacles and other crazy stuff. To be honest there are about million gazillion ways to do stuff in max. Once you gone trough the entire 3dsMax application, then the real learning begins. You will start up picking tricks and tips on how to do stuff

Well, not quite Max bible but one other very fat book. It's 1300 pg "3dsMax 8 Enciclopedia" in Russian
I bought it two years ago and only now decided and found strenght to really give it a go. Agree on you saying where real learning begins. I just feel like it, soooo much to learn and master how to mix all tips, tricks and tools into something. Damn, max is deep! You know, like for a moment I was thinking about keeping my skills in max on good but generic level and give a try to some new 3d app too. Now I think, F other apps (at least for now). Really want to explore it very deeply. Guess it could be called being maxocholic.

Ou, and by the way, few hours after post I discovered some more good stuff in lofting, really expands what could be done with them. Later will share some tips, may be usefull to others.

Hehe i tried to read a Russian 3dsMax book once. After reading 6 pages my head exploded

You are right about sticking to one app. 3DsMax wont go anywhere and its a great tool to produce high quality CG. I tried to learn Maya once but got back to max because the interface of Max was easier to for me and i did not see the point of learning 2 different apps at the same time.

intersting stuff. I used loft a lot with max 3.5-4 while i was working on mods for UT to do shotgun barrels and stuff
never used it again though... guess i forgot about it hehe

I found myself only using the poly modeling technique; that's why I always thought I could easily switch software because I'm not really bound to software-specific methods. Since the new finally implemented loop cuts and other stuff I was missing, I'm seriously thinking of giving it a go. They also updated the GUI to a more intuitive and simple design and added tons of features.