New beginner : Floating boat animation

[jajawong]

:oops:
I am a beginner of 3D Animation and I need your help.
Floating Boat Animation is actually my final year project.
I am going to use 3D studio max for the 3D graphics, and Java for the 3D programming.

I have to demonstrate the floating motion of 4 types of boat under 4 types of background(e.g. river across a city or river across a forest).
User can control the frequency of floating motion of the boat (i.e. larger wave at the same time) by pressing a button. Is there existing library can implement this?

I want to know how you guys model the movement of the object that you want to "draw"? As now I am going to draw diffierent kinds of boat under different backgrounds, I really dont know how they move in the real life.How can I do?

Also, do you have any comment on the software and programming language or anything that I have to pay attention to?Can the 3D studio max graphics be imported into java 3D for manipulation?
Pls help, thx!

[jajawong]

any help?

[elias4444]

Well, good news and bad news...

Good news is, sure you can do all that!

Bad news is, you'll have to program it yourself.

I don't know of anything that can import 3DS files into lwjgl, but there is an XML importer built into the API, and I posted a simple OBJ importer in another thread (can you export from 3DSMax out to OBJ? Most programs can).

As for the movement simulation, that gets pretty tricky. I would kind of hope that since it's your school project, that you've learned a bit about it in your class. Off the top of my head, I would say to simulate the boats track along the Y axis with a sine wave. You could then modulate the amplitude of the wave using standard functions. I'm not sure how realistic you're wanting it to be though.

[jam007]

Yes, the simulation of movement is tricky. I would have a talk with my teacher to clarify how this should be modeled.
1D, 2D or 3D movement?
waves much longer than the boat only or waves of the same order of length as the boat. It gets really tricky in the later case due too resonance
How accurate does it need to be. Shape of boat hull? CG? Inertial forces?
...

Is it primary a programming or a physics project? in the former case you can probably cheat with some sine functions, tweeking the factors till you think it looks ok.

Anders