INSIDE 3DS MAX® 7 [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Chapter 14. Introduction to Animation

By Sean Bonney

Picture a balla shiny, chrome-mirrored ball. Now close your eyes and imagine doing something cool with it using 3ds max. Did your ball bounce wildly around the scene, or stretch into a crazy shape? Or perhaps explode into a thousand shards? Odds are, the first thing that came to mind involved animation.

The core of 3ds max is truly its animation system, which allows you to bring life to any alien world, crusty robot, chugging engine, or even any workaday industrial mechanism you can think up. The real trick is to plan your attack wisely, so that your swirling system of planets becomes a celestial ballet and not a tangled mess of spheres.

3ds max 7 features several commonly used animation tools, including constraints, controllers, and parameter wiring. In this chapter, we'll examine the constraints system, as well as methods of using several constraints in unison to achieve an animation goal.

Constraints are, in effect, a type of controller. You are probably already familiar with the more common 3ds max controllers, such as Bézier and Linear controllers. Animation controllers store an object's animation keyframes and, most significantly, control the manner in which the object's behavior is interpolated between keys. Anyone who has ever witnessed an animated object swing wildly between keys should be aware of the importance of using the appropriate controller. One of the most powerful, the Script controller, will be used in this chapter to give high-detail control over an object's animation.

Parameter wiring is a powerful method of controlling objects in a scene by linking animatable parameters between two objects. One object can control or otherwise relate to the other object through the Parameter Wiring dialog. This dialog supports augmenting the relationship through mathematical expressions, as we'll demonstrate.

We will also explore manipulators, which are onscreen helper objects such as sliders that can be quickly and easily wired to control nearly any parameter of any object in a scene.

Whatever tools you use to set up your animation, the real power and flexibility of max lie in the nearly open-ended ways in which max tools can be interconnected to achieve a desired effect.