Week 7


Further Animation Techniques

For the past 6 weeks I've learnt alot in modelling techniques and I'm now looking forward to animating my models, the camera techniques that we were shown this week in tutorial are very useful to know, as path constraints will play a major part in my animation.
  
Using cameras

Target and free camera

I started by placing a cube in the center of the plane, i then added a target camera and highlighted the target at the end of the camera, this can be placed anywhere in the area and the camera will follow it. I then put the target at the center of the cube and moved the z axis up slightly. Free camera works in a similar way apart from it doesn't have a target to follow, the camera has to be controlled using the rotate and select and move tool, this can be awkward when animating as you have to use the auto key to tell 3d max where u want the camera to be in the animation. In order to view what the camera see's i selected the camera 01 view port


Using Path constraints

Path constraints are very useful as the give a much smoother camera flow when playing the scene is played out, rather than using free camera. To achieve this i firstly selected circle from the shapes bar, and making a circle on the plane. then selecting the camera and going to animation, path constraints and selecting the line, the camera instantly attaches itself to the line. when played out the camera moved 360 degrees around the cube.


 Curve Editor

I found the curve editor and dope sheet more complicated to use as I've not used this tool before, so it took a few tries before i understood it. I firstly made a sphere and selected auto key and moved to 50 frames and moved the z axis up, then moving to 100 frames and dropping the z axis. Taking auto key off, then right clicking and selecting curve editor you are show a new window with blue, green and red lines. These lines are the axis of the sphere and can be adjusted so that the sphere doesn't just move up and down it can go side to side, or up and down at an angle. We were then shown how to assign controllers to the z, y, x axis, including waveform float and noise float so that the sphere shakes when it goes up and down.