Week 2

Animating Using Paths

Week 2

Last week we were introduced to the basic animation tools within 3DS Max, building on this knowledge we continued by incorporating paths within the animation process.

Paths basically act as a route which a designated object can be made to follow. This can be achieved by using any type of spline to create the desired path which are also non-renderable by default, consequently paths will not show up in the final rendered animation.

Once the path has been created, the currently selected object can be assigned to the path by accessing the "Animation" menu and then selecting "Constraints ---> Path Constraint". The object will then snap & attach itself to the path where it can then be made to follow the path exactly including changes in height in addition to the option of "banking".

Animating along a path can be an essential technique when representing linear movement, a typical useful example would be to recreate a virtual walkthrough using a "Free Camera" to follow a path around a building. This was also the goal of this week's tutorial, as a result I modelled an indoor structure which I gave a "Prison" like appearance using bars to represent cells as well as stressed looking textures to portray an aged /dirty environment.

Initially I lit the scene using a combination of "Mental Ray" Omni and Target Spot Lights, although these produced the desired dark/shadowed atmosphere that I intended, they had to be removed when I came to rendering the final animation. This was due to the fact that the Mental Ray Renderer enables high quality lighting effects, therefore enhancing the appearance of textures. However on the downside the rendering process would have taken a considerable amount of time, in addition to producing a large output file size. Therefore I deleted these lights and assigned the "Default Scanline Renderer" which doesn't produce as high quality lighting results but renders a great deal faster, which is more practical for my purpose of rendering a short scene merely to demonstrate animation techniques.

I initialized the animation process by using the "Line" tool to draw out my desired path in the Top Viewport. The spline's individual vertices were then moved around to tweak the shape of the path especially relating to its height at multiple points. All the vertices were given a type of smooth or bezier to ensure a more fluent animation once a camera had been assigned to the path.

I then created a "Free Camera" which was assigned to the path using the Path Constraint feature found under the Animation menu. With the camera snapped to the guide I then enabled a further option "Follow Path" on the camera's parameters which caused its angle to follow the gradient of the path rather than consistently remaining at 90 degrees for example.

The last changes I implemented were to the "Curves" of the camera's movent using the curve editor to reposition its keys. In addition I also inserted several "Stepped Tangents" which maintained the camera's position at several points, causing to pause for a second an then continue following the path.

Final Animation