Preparing Output

Introduction to reactor

Rag Doll Tutorial

 

Autodesk 3ds Max Tutorials > Special Effects > Introduction to reactor > 

Reducing File Size

You now have keyframes for your objects’ motion that can be used for creating animations or still renderings. However, each object currently has a keyframe for every frame. This means that your file size is quite large; it will also be quite difficult to tweak an object's behavior after the simulation.

reactor provides access to a reduction process that attempts to remove redundant keyframes for the rigid bodies. You can provide a threshold value for the algorithm that guarantees that the motion of the objects after this reduction will be within that factor of their original value. In this section, you will reduce the keyframes for your rigid bodies.

Remove redundant keyframes after simulation:

1. On the Utilities panel > click reactor and expand the Preview and Animation rollout.
2. In the Preview and Animation rollout, set Start Frame to 0 and End Frame to 100.
3. On the Utilities panel, expand the Utils rollout. In the Key Management group, click Reduce Now.

   This reduces the keyframes for all active rigid bodies in the simulation. For this example, use the default threshold value of 0.5.

4. Look at the animation again. As you can see, the behavior of the rigid bodies in your scene is almost exactly the same as before the reduction process, but the number of keyframes for each toy is greatly reduced. The motion of the toys is still quite complex, but the file size has been reduced about 30%.
5. Save your scene as my_reactor_intro_final.max. If you like, you can compare your results with the saved file reactor_intro_final.max. About midway through your animation, your scene should look something like the following illustration.