First Look - Animation

Today we learned the basics of animation of 3ds max. I enjoyed these tutorials and found it easier than making animation in flash.

The tutorial that we did was creating 3 bouncing balls bouncing at different times.

To do this I created one sphere to begin woth and animated it so that it just went up and down once. I then used the curve editor to make the bounce look more realistic by slowing the movement down as it reaced the top of the bounce and speeding it up as it is at the bottom of the bounce.

When I was happy with that result I then looped the motion so that it carried on throughout the entire length of the animation.

I then copied the ball twice so that I had three balls. I opened the dope sheet and edited it so that each ball bounced at separate times and at different speeds.

I had a bit of a problem on my first go as I had made copies of the sphere when auto key was still active this made it look like one ball morphing into three!

I was happy with the outcome of this tutorial and very much enjoyed it.