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.

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

	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.

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. Let’s 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.

	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.

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.

Let’s 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.

© 2000, Frol (selection, edition, publication)