PART III
Animation

CHAPTER 6
Keys to Animation

Featuring

•  Understanding Keyframe Animation

•  Timing Your Animation

•  Working with the MAX Animation Tools

•  Exploring the Track View

•  Animating Transforms and Parameters

•  Animating Sub-Object Elements

•  Animating Particle Systems

•  Morphing

•  Using Controllers to Animate

This chapter will provide a foundation of animation concepts and methods of animating in MAX. We will introduce you first to basic principles of animation, and then apply those principles to MAX. Additionally, this chapter will provide insight and ideas for creating a wide variety of animations using simple animation methods in MAX. Finally, this chapter will discuss the mechanics behind animation in MAX: the animation controller.

Grasping Concepts of Time in Animation

Animation involves creating the illusion of motion through a succession of images, called frames, played fast enough to fool the human eye. This illusion is caused by a property of the human eye called “persistence of vision.” The smoothness of the perceived motion is affected by how fast the images are played (the frame rate), as well as the continuity between the images.

Understanding Keyframe Animation

As described in Chapter 1, animation can be created straight ahead, with each frame being created in order, as in stop-motion animation, or can be created pose-to-pose, with significant poses keyframed and the transition frames filled in afterwards. Animation in 3D applications uses the keyframe method.

Disney’s Keyframe Method

Disney started it all. Walt Disney’s animation studios developed cel animation into a streamlined production pipeline. The Disney process developed conventions and principles that have served all types of animators ever since.

Disney’s method involved dividing the painting of cels into two main tasks: drawing the significant poses and drawing all the transition frames between these poses. The best, most experienced artists were reserved for drawing the key frames of the significant poses, called, naturally enough, keyframes. The apprentice artists then took on the arduous task of drawing all the in-between frames, called tweens.

For example, if Mickey Mouse were to hit a tennis ball, the keyframe artists would decide which were the most important poses to tell the story of Mickey hitting a tennis ball. Those poses might be broken down as shown in Table 6.1.

After drawing these key poses, the keyframers would give them to tweeners to create all the motion frames that take place between these keyframes. Because of the sheer number of frames to be tweened, tweening could be a very tedious, although obviously indispensable, job.

MAX Keyframe Animation

When using MAX, you are the keyframer, and the program does all the tedious in-between work. This leaves you the simple task of generating the keyframes. No problem right?

Well, for some changes and motions, animating in 3D really can be quite simple. In this chapter you will become acquainted with this simplicity, and learn how to get an animation started in MAX. Chapter 7 will come back to the complexities of timing and getting the precise result you want.

Timing Your Animation

Understanding time and how it relates to animation is very important. As an animator, you will need to become very aware of the timing of ordinary motions. A stopwatch is an essential tool for this, and you should believe the stopwatch. Yes, it takes that long to sit down or to make a salute.

TIP Studying the masters of traditional cel animation will help you get a ballpark idea of how to break down a motion. It will help your animation greatly to learn the classic principles of traditional animation, such as anticipation, follow-through, ease in and out, squash and stretch, moving holds, and secondary motion. An excellent resource for this is The Illusion of Life, a book on Disney animation by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.

Thinking in Frames

To think like an animator, you need to translate all your timing into frames. The number of frames will depend on the frame rate of your output. Frame rates vary from 60 frames per second, the upper limit of what the human eye can perceive, down to 10 frames per second, currently common on the Internet and the lower limit for any approximation of smooth motion. Table6.2 shows some common frame rates used today.

© 2000, Frol (selection, edition, publication)