Page Turn in 3DS Max

I received an email from someone wanting to know how to animate a page turn in flash. I built one in a short time and sent it, however I got to thinking, and created this in 3D Studio Max, for import into Swift 3D and then Flash.

Create two boxes for the parts of the open book with the following dimensions.

Length: 200
Width: 150
Height: 5

We are going to bend these boxes as books seldom sit flat so don't forget to give the boxes some segments. On the right you'll see the creation panel for my boxes.

Now either copy those two and scale, or create two new boxes below them...for the cover of the book.

Next

Select the first two boxes you created, and add a skew modifier, and adjust the settings until you get a nice looking book. Now lets make a page to turn. Create a Quad Patch the same size as the right hand side of the book. Below you will see the settings I used for my Quad Patch.

Zoom in and make sure you get the patch lined up.

Find the helpers (little tape measure button on left here) and select DUMMY. Go to the top frame and create a dummy helper near to the center of the page. Ideally you'll have half the Dummy on and half off the page. Now link the Dummy to the Quad Patch. To do this select the Quad Patch and use the LINK button and select the Dummy. Test this by rotating the Dummy....the page should follow it.

Okay ....

Right, now all you need to do, is turn on the animate button, move to the last frame (50 in my animation) and rotate the Dummy around 180 degrees. To see this moving open up your material editor, and apply any material to the QuadPatch...just make sure you put a tick in the 2 sided box. Now if you play it you should see it moving. Now if you were doing this for digital rendering, video or such like, you could apply some texture maps with pictures etc. But as I'm doing this for flash I'm just using solid colours.

Right, now all you need to do, is turn on the animate button, move to the last frame (50 in my animation) and rotate the Dummy around 180 degrees. To see this moving open up your material editor, and apply any material to the QuadPatch...just make sure you put a tick in the 2 sided box. Now if you play it you should see it moving. Now if you were doing this for digital rendering, video or such like, you could apply some texture maps with pictures etc. But as I'm doing this for flash I'm just using solid colours.

I don't think I've ever seen a page turn and stay stiff. To fix this we just use a bend modifier to the Quad Patch Now before you go changing any of the settings, we need to shift the center of the Bend Gizmo to line up with the helper. This way the bend modifier will not affect the edge in the binding. Now it gets a little complicated.

Turn on the animation button

... and shift the animation slider to 1/4 of the length (for me it's frame 12). And turn on the Key Frame button.

Now adjust the Bend Angle to give your page a bend. As you can see from my one on the right here, I've set the angle to -55, around the X axis. You can play and adjust it to your specifics.

Next you can add a twist modifier, and shift it's Gizmo's Center point to the top left corner, this lifts the lower left corner. However for this example I decided not to.

That's it, you can set up lights and such like if you want, and render it out. Given that I was going to import this into Flash, I'd have exported every second frame as a 3DS file poped it into Swift 3D (or used Swift 3D Max) to create Flash ready files.