Curver Editor Key Manipulation Questions

[MegaPixel]

Software Used: 3D Studio MAX 6

 

I've landed myself a Technical Animation of a Product Packaging Line. As you can imagine, there are lots of objects moving, appearing and disappearing at different rates. My best friend so far has been the Curve Editor for managing and manipulating the keys. However there are some techniques I just can't lock down yet which would be huge time savers for me. For example:

 

1) Looping an objects keys for a specific amount of time, say 10 cycles, so that I can add some more unique keys to make the object move differently?

 

Up until now, I've just been using the "out-of-range" loop types for my repetative stuff. For every unique move my objects make, I create a duplicate of that object and hide the original. Seems very inefficient for me to do this. (lots of work)

 

2) Is there a way to group objects together "after" they've been animated so that you can move several objects together or hide several objects at once.

 

Up until now, If I want a group of objects to move at once, I'll create a new object that represents the grouped objects, have it appear ontop of the existing objects, and hide the existing objects. Again, seems kind of inefficient to me.

 

Learning Keyframing on your own with 3D Studio MAX is a challenge for sure. This looks like such a complicated beast but highly capable non the less. Thanks for any words of advice you might have for me in advance.

 

MegaPixel

[Videha]

HI David

im not sure if i unterstood your proplem

you can link objects to a dummy object

and animate the dummy the child does its own animatet thingi but follows the dummy

also what about using visability track to make things disaper

[MegaPixel]

Hi Videha,

 

I guess I don't really have a "problem" per say, I'm brute forcing my way through the animation. It just seems that I'm going about it the extremely long and difficult way. There is soo much I don't understand about animation , that whole "Parent-Child" relationship thing you mentioned, linking objects, and general keyframing terminology. I have been using the Visibility track and it has been a life saver. I guess I'm just looking for tips and tricks for Packaging Line style animations, where you have multiple objectss moving at different rates of speed, appearing and disappearing and setting them up to be as "Parametric" as possible. In other words, easily adjustable down the road if the viewer decides the speeds need to change.

 

One thing I am having trouble with is path contrained objects not being moved at real world units. For instance, if I have a block constrined to a path, and I move it 8 inches on the x transform, it actually only moves about 7 inches for some reason? I'll try to post the results when I'm finished but I'd love to seem a tutorial that covers this type of technical animation style. I think Visualization has HUGE potential in the Packaging & Process Mechanical Industries.