Faces

With your box still selected, select Face from the Sub-Object drop-down list. Now instead of having a single vertex selected, you have a triangle selected, as shown in Figure 1.8. That triangle is called a face. Faces are what allow an object to be covered with materials, reflect light, and have some type of shape. An edge connects two vertices and forms a portion of a face, with three edges forming a face; faces are made up of three vertices each, so every face is a triangle. Click around the box and notice how each side is made up of two faces.

FIGURE 1.9  Box showing a selected face

Polygons

Choose Polygon from the Sub-Object drop-down list. Figure 1.10 shows the selected side of your box. A polygon is defined as a set of adjacent faces that lie in the same plane; in this instance, two triangles are selected, forming a square. A polygon is just an easy way to select and manipulate a set of faces at once.

FIGURE 1.10  Box showing a selected polygon

Elements

The last area in the list we want you to try is element. You probably have figured out what an element is, but let’s take a look at it anyway. With Element selected, click the box. You will see (as in Figure 1.11) that the entire box is selected. An element is basically a continuous mesh: a set of continuous faces grouped together into one larger object. (Separate elements that function together are collectively considered an object. For example, let’s say you are going to create a tree. You create the tree trunk and the branches as one mesh, and the leaves as another mesh. Then you attach them together to form one mesh object from the two. Each part is now an element of the whole object. Any changes you make on the object affect both elements; to change the elements independently you would need to go into the sub-object element level.)

FIGURE 1.11  Box showing a selected element

To illustrate a better example of the sub-object level element, look at Figure 1.12. Here we’ve added a sphere to the box, and the sphere is selected. In the Element sub-object selection level, we can select either the box or the sphere as a single element, but not both of them together. To select them as a whole, we’d need to be in the Object selection level.

FIGURE 1.12  A sphere selected in the Element level

As you can see, a single mesh is made up of many different levels. Each level builds on the other. A vertex defines a point in space; the line between two vertices makes an edge; three edges with common vertices make a face; two coplanar faces make a polygon; and all the polygons of a continuous mesh make up an element.

Understanding How Animation Happens

When we talk about animation, we’re talking about bringing something to life... giving something movement... making something full of energy and activity.

There are many different styles of animation. We’ll look at three types—stop motion, cel, and keyframe. This section briefly covers some explanations of these methods; for a detailed explanation of animating in MAX, please see Part 3.

Stop Motion

Stop motion animation is the process of breaking a figure’s motion into a series of increments. The increments are created by moving the figure to different positions and recording each of those increments on film. When the film is played back at full speed, it gives the viewer the illusion that the figure is moving freely and on its own. If you have seen Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas or the old black-and-white film King Kong, then you have seen an excellent example of stop motion animation.

Stop motion animators work with physical models that are made of many different substances, such as plaster, wire mesh, or even clay. The process for creating a stop motion animation is tedious, as the filmmaker poses the model, takes a picture, slightly moves the model, takes another picture, and so on.

For example, to animate a character’s head moving up five inches and then turning left to right thirty degrees, you would have to move the head one inch up and take a picture, move the head another inch up and take a picture, and so on and so on.

Cel

Cel animation is probably the oldest and most-used type of animation. In cel animation, a series of 2D images or drawings that make up a story are put together in chronological order to create movement. Artists, or storyboard artists as they are commonly called, draw each picture of the scene or show. There can be thousands of drawings for a particular scene.

Most of today’s cartoons are still produced using cel animation, but the older Disney movies are some of the best examples of cel animation you can find. Disney animators would draw every sequence in 2D picture form and then, just like with stop motion animation, they would record each 2D picture with a special type of camera. After that was complete, they could play the animation back.

Another example of cel animation is a flipbook. On each page of the book is a different drawing of the same character, but in a different position. So if there were 100 pages in the book, there would be 100 different positions of the same character. You just flip the corner of the book and the movement of the pages creates the illusion that the character is moving.

Keyframe

Keyframe animation was created out of cel animation. The demands on the skills of lead cel animation artists meant that they could not spend all their time drawing out every picture for every scene. So they drew out only the main ones—the key pictures, or keyframes. They then gave co-workers the keyframes to use as starting and ending points, and the other artists filled in the rest. It saved the lead artist an enormous amount of time.

This process of creating the key movements and then letting someone else fill in the rest is the same process that MAX uses. For example, if you are going to animate a door opening in MAX, you will make two keyframes—one with the door closed and the other with the door open. MAX will fill in the rest of the keys.

Summary

This chapter introduced you to the fundamental concepts behind 3D graphics. You learned about the terms X, Y, and Z and their relationship to one another and 3D space.

You should now have an understanding of what faces, vertices, and edges are. You should also have a firm grasp of what a viewport is and the principles behind viewing objects in MAX.

You were also introduced to the basic concept of animation and the three main ways animation is done.

Now that you have the basics of 3D and animation, it’s time to explore the concepts of creating, manipulating, animating, and rendering objects in 3D space and taking that knowledge into 3D Studio MAX.