Interactive Animation

Interactive Animations are a lot of fun. I remember playing with these sorts of point and click games as a child. Always a blast. This time I got to make my own! I mean primarily obviously the purpose here is to learn how to use max but still a fun little project. Wish WPI allowed me more time to work on it and make it more intricate!

Lets start this time by showing you what I have done:

I decided to use a corner of my room as the appropriate position to make this interactive animation. As you can see i sort of divided the image itself into a handful of basic sections. Here is a basic idea of what the patch looks like:

Well how does it work you ask? Why it is simple indeed! The jit.world object is incredibly versatile, so long as you specify in all your objects that they belong within the world. That said the jit.picker object is where all of the magic happens. It does most of the hard work for me by figuring out which items my mouse is hovering over and then if i clicked on it or not. By using the Select object i can then choose specifically for the mouse click data to use as a trigger to effectively begin the animation that I created for that section of the image.

To make sure that the appropriate thing gets highlighted I used a bunch of invisible objects with their position and scale hard coded in. How are they invisible? By setting their alpha to 0. Making sure they are layered on top of the main video plane allows for their interaction to be smooth and seamless.
Here is what they look like:

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