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Mastering
3D Studio MAX R3 |
The Track View Edit Window
| The right pane of the Track View is the
Track View edit window. This is where you can edit keys and the transitions
between them, called tangents. It consists of a time ruler showing the
active time segment of the animation in white. A vertical line marks
the frame your scene is currently at. You can zoom in and out of the
edit window with the zoom tools in the lower-right corner of the Track
View. These work much like the zoom tools for the viewports.
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In the position track of your animated box, you can see two circles,
at frames 0 and 100, as in Figure 6.8. These are the position keys created
when you animated the box.
FIGURE
6.8 The animated box in the Track View edit
window
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| TIP If you click the Move
Keys button and then right-click one of keys, you bring up the Key
Info dialog box for that key.
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Getting Started Animating
in MAX
In cel animation, drawing key poses was considered more challenging than
drawing tweens. Some frames might be more difficult to draw because of
perspective shifts, and some shots could involve a complexity of cel layers.
However, for the most part, each frame still needed to be drawn, so the
overall complexity remained relatively the same throughout. In computer
animation, some changes (a change in position or parameter between two
frames, for instance) are much simpler to animate than others. MAX has
also reduced some changes that might have been exceedingly complex (such
as morphing) to a very simple interface for even a beginning user. Lets
look at some of these simple animation options.
Animating
Transforms
Transform animation is the animation of any of the transforms
of an object: move, rotate, or scale. This is the kind of animation that
you created when you animated a box earlier in this chapter. It involves
changes to the transform matrix of the object, which, as you may recall
from the discussion of object dataflow in Chapter 4, is evaluated after
all changes to the master object and its modifiers. As your animation
becomes more complex, the position in the object dataflow can become more
significant.
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| TIP You can always create
an equivalent transform animation in the modifier stack by using the
XForm modifier. An example of this is presented in Animating
Sub-Objects, below.
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Animating
Parameters
Most parameters in MAX are animatable, with a few exceptions. To find
out whether a parameter is animatable, you can turn on the Animate button,
move to a new frame, change a parameter, and see if it animates over time.
The other way to check is to look in the Track View. If the parameter
has a track with a green triangle in front of it, the parameter is animatable.
Lets try out some simple parametric animations.
Animating a Modifier
One form of parametric animation is animating the parameters of a modifier.
There are many modifiers that provide the ability to deform geometry for
animation purposes. Table 6.6 lists those modifiers and the level at which
they can be applied, whether object level, sub-object level,
or both.
Table 6.6: ANIMATABLE MODIFIERS
Modifier
| Object Deform
| Sub-Object Deform
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Bend
| ü
| ü
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Twist
| ü
| ü
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Taper
| ü
| ü
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Noise
| ü
| ü
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Delete Mesh
|
| ü
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Displace
| ü
| ü
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Edit Mesh
|
| ü
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Face Extrude
|
| ü
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FFD (all)
| ü
| ü
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Flex
| ü
| ü
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Morpher
| ü
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Patch Deform
| ü
| ü
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Push
| ü
| ü
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Relax
| ü
| ü
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Ripple
| ü
| ü
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Skew
| ü
| ü
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Skin
| ü
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Slice
| ü
| ü
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Spherify
| ü
| ü
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Squeeze
| ü
| ü
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Stretch
| ü
| ü
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Wave
| ü
| ü
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XForm
| ü
| ü
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© 2000, Frol (selection,
edition, publication)
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