This animation uses Follow Path, and LookAt to have the red cone follow the path while looking at the central sphere. The path has been duplicated and then rendered as a mesh so that it is visible. Also a second cone was linked to the first cone so that its orientation can be seen as it follows the path.

The moving rods and pistons show another use of LookAt. The horizontal rods are animated to move back and forth. The balls and pistons [just nested cyllinders] are linked to follow the rods. The wide part of the piston is looking at the the ball, and the inner piston is looking at the outer piston. In max, both sets of pistons behave the same, but in RTRE, the red piston fails to behave correctly. Note that it is not possible to have two objects look at each other, so another object, the ball, is required to complete the circuit.

To fix the blue piston in RTRE, it is quite simple. One merely has to add some dummy keyframes to cause RTRE to pickup the animation of the objects as they are transformed by max. To do this, add a position keyframe to the first and last frame. The look at constraints are rotational constraints, so this does not conflict with a position key. But the position keys cause RTRE to pickup the entire transform for the object, including the rotation, so the look at constraint is correctly animated by RTRE.

Download the FollowPath Scene

This animation uses a rotation script for the gears like this:

( eulerAngles 0 0 (360*currenttime/100) ) as quat

This can be customized by either changing the 360 to a larger number of degrees to speed up the animation, or by changing the 100 to match the number of frames in the animation. Balls are linked to the gears so that their rotation can be more easily followed. The gears were created by the Geodesic program available on this site.

Download Rotating Gears

Download Dungeon Map 7

The poolstalk scene combines animation with sound and camera capture.
There are two ways to get up to the pool. Walk through the spinning disk of the teleport module and you will be transported to the pool side. Or take the elevator. To use the elevator, navigate near the elevator and then click the green button. If the elevator is not waiting for you , click the red button to bring it down.

Download PoolStalk

To use one of these scenes, download the zip file, by clicking on the picture, then unzip it and run it. You will need a reasonably powerful PC, Windows 2000 or better, and a pretty good video card. However, these scenes will work on a 1.3GHz laptop with Intel integrated graphics. It is best to have nVidia or ATI graphics.

To navigate through the scenes use the arrow keys to move around, and the page UP and DOWN buttons to move up and down. DELETE and END move back and forth. There is no gravity, unlike the other scene explorers such as Walkabout and Quest3D.

You can find examples of RTRE scenes in other posts in this category.

RTRE is now maintained and updated by TurboSquid as a certified plug-in for max.

RTRE was designed originally as a visualization tool for architectural projects. Unfortunately it has not been enhanced over the last few years to include new features in the new graphics cards.

Limitations
RTRE has some significant limitations:

1. No Gravity. So you can’t walk down stairs for example.
2. No transparent moving textures. So flames can’t be done realistically.
3. No animated UVmaps. So special effects using moving textures aren’t possible.
4. No animated meshes. It’s not possible to have animated people or animals without animated meshes.
5. No particle support. Not even for small numbers of mesh based particles.

Some obvious enhancements would take better advantage of new graphics
cards.

1. Bump mapping using either standard bump maps, or
   pixel normal maps [DDS files].
2. Vertex displacement maps. Maybe using DDS files. Aren’t they used
   for that too?