MassFx Animation

[josh_vln]

I am currently rendering a simple animation of a chair emerging from a pile of plastic bottles (concept is that the chair is fabricated from plastic bottles). Is there a way to simulate interaction from both the chair and plastic bottles colliding/bumping with each other while the chair emerges upward. Attached is a gif of the animation I'm doing.

[romullus]

Yes, of course it's possible to simulate what you want. You can do this with native 3ds Max tools like massFX, or pflow, but arguably the best and easiest way is to use third-party tyflow plugin. It's particle based tool, which is incredibly powerful and flexible. Tyflow is a commercial, but there is also a free version which has few limitations, but is plenty enough to achieve what you want. And the best thing is that there are loads of tutorials, mostly on youtube, that can get you started in no time. I'm quite sure that you can even find a tutorial that shows how to do almost exactly what you want with the chair, so you could have pretty decent result by the end of the day :]