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Mastering 3D Studio MAX R3

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Using Controllers to Animate

Animation controllers are the instructions MAX uses to create and interpret the keys of an animation. With animation controllers, you are getting closer to the guts of MAX: why the computer “draws” the frames it does from your settings. In this section, we’ll look at the more common controllers and how to switch between them. In the next chapter, we will cover some of the ways to refine the effects of controllers through tangent types.

Top 5 MAX Concepts

Controllers: Do You Control Them or Do They Control You?

Have you ever been killing time in MAX, maybe on your lunch break, and gone into the Track View and expanded all the tracks, just to see what you get? If you have, you might have noticed all the different shapes the tracks have next to them. There are purple cylinders, blues spheres, and yellow boxes. Add some green clovers and it’s a box of Lucky Charms!

But if you really do expand all the tracks, you will notice an abundance of green triangles "pointing" to the right. There are a lot of them for sure. What do they all mean? Here is the answer.

Every place you see that triangle in the Track View indicates that particular track is animatable: you’re allowed to change its settings over time. But it also means something else. Every green triangle you see also indicates a controller is being used.

A controller is nothing more than a tool for a particular job. Like choosing the right kind of screwdriver, choosing the right controller depends on the task at hand. If you want something to move in straight lines, without any ease in or ease out, choose the Linear controller.

What most new MAX users get confused about are the default controllers selected by the developers. They don’t realize they can change them! The Bezier Float controller is the most common default controller in MAX, but that does not mean it’s the best or most versatile controller!

Another aspect of controllers that many people get confused about is the fact that you can have controllers within controllers. For example: A box has a default Bezier Float controller on its position track. This controller does not allow you to keyframe the X, Y, and Z positions separately. So we change the Bezier Float controller to an XYZ controller. This controller breaks out each axis of motion separately, and we get a Bezier Float on each individual axis of motion.

Now let’s say we want to have this object (pretend it’s a car) jitter up and down like it’s going over a dirt road. We expand the Z axis track and change the Bezier Float controller to a Random Noise controller. Now the object randomly bounces up and down in one axis, while allowing me to have great control over the other two axes of motion. This is possible because of the XYZ controller!

One good thing about all this is that when you go to change a controller, MAX only shows you the controllers that will work for the current object or operation. The program won’t even let you try to use the RGB Color controller for position tracks, for example.

So next time you are killing time in MAX, try this. Launch the Track View. Expand all the tracks. Click the Filters button and check the Show Controllers option. Then look at all the tracks and see what is controlling them. Try changing them to see what’s available and what is possible. The sooner you understand that controllers are just tools and not "fixed" features you have to deal with, the sooner MAX will begin to be a tool you use easily and naturally.

Using the Default Controllers

When you use the Animate button, MAX assigns the default controller for the keys created. Whenever you change the assignment of a controller, you can choose to make the new controller the default for this type of track. Let’s look at some of the default controllers. Open the Track View of your animated box file from earlier (anim_box.max).


TIP A quick way to open the Track View for just one object is to select the object, right-click it, and choose Track View Selected from the shortcut menu.

PRS Controller

Open the box’s hierarchy. The default Transform track has three subtracks nested under it: Position, Rotation, and Scale. This is called the PRS controller. We will look at other options for the Transform track later.

Bezier Controller

The most common default for controllers is the Bezier controller. Click the Filters button and check Controller Types. You will see that the Position track now says “Bezier Position.” Let’s look at what that means.

1.  Reset MAX.
2.  Create a sphere in the upper-left corner of the top view and turn on its trajectory display.
3.  Go to frame 50 and turn on the Animate button. Move the sphere to the upper-right corner of the top view. The trajectory is a straight line.
4.  Go to frame 100 and move the sphere to the lower-right corner of the top view. Notice that the trajectory curved when you did this.
5.  Turn off the Animate button. Keep this file open if you are going to continue with the next three exercises.

The curve of the trajectory created is the effect of the Bezier position controller: It instructs MAX to transition from one key to the next with a Bezier curve calculation. This is often very helpful, but not always exactly what you want.

TCB Controller

In 3D Studio for DOS, the only controller available was the TCB (Tension, Continuity, and Bias) controller. TCB is still the default controller for rotation and for many plug-ins.

1.  Still in the file from the previous section, click the Add Key button and create a key somewhere in the rotation track.
2.  Click the Move Keys button and then right-click the key you just made to get the Key Info dialog box (shown in Figure 6.14). This is the dialog box for a TCB controller.


FIGURE 6.14  The Key Info dialog box for a TCB controller

The little X’s in the graph represent transition frames into and out of the keyframe. This graph can be changed with the tension, continuity, and bias settings of the Key Info dialog box. It does the same thing that we will do later with function curves, but is less intuitive to understand.


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