Basic animation help please

Started by Mohawk20, February 26, 2007, 03:14:18 PM

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Mohawk20

Ok, this is a verry Noob question, but can someone explain to me step by step how Key frames can be set?

I have a great idea about having trees spring up out of the ground in a cartoonish way, but I cannot find a 'record keyframe' button, like in C4D.


Thank you!
Howgh!

Will

do you have deep+animation?

if so then there is some thing that invole the numbers turning blue but i'm sure someone else can give you a much much better explination.

Regards,

Will
The world is round... so you have to use spherical projection.

Mohawk20

Yes, i do have Deep+Animation, otherwise I wouldn't even have to try... Good of you to ask.
Howgh!

Oshyan

Animation tools are fairly basic right now. You can create individual keyframes and see where keyframes exist when you are at their position in the timeline, but you can't easily delete single keyframes or know where all keyframes are, without manually "scrubbing" the timeline and watching the colors change.

To add a keyframe for an animatable value press the "Curve A" button that has an "'s curve" with an A next to it, which will be next to any value you can animate. A small pop-up menu will appear. Choose "Set Animation Key". Now move the timeline at the bottom to a new frame number, change the value for your animated setting, and do "Set Animation Key" again. Now as you scrub the timeline you should see the values change, interpolated beween your two keyframed settings. Keyframed values will show up green, interpolated values will show up blue. Right now there is no choice of interpolation type and no way to manually edit the curves.

To delete a keyframe you have to either manually edit the .tgd file, or delete the entire animation with the "Delete Animation" option on the animation button menu.

Once you have setup one or more animated values you use the Sequence/Output tab options to setup a sequence output and then "Render Sequence". You can setup a range of frames to output, a format, etc. To setup how many total frames in your animation, use the "Project Settings" (lower left, next to the timeline).

I hope that basic overview will get you started. There's really not too much more to tell at this point since the tools are fairly limited, but it can still be a lot of fun to experiment with as you can animate almost any setting.

A proper animation timeline and curve editor will be implemented in the future and available in the final release.

- Oshyan

Mohawk20

Thank you Oshyan, I will take a look at it tomorow, now off to bed!
Howgh!

Mohawk20

Once I found the button, things went smooth!
It's great we can animate everything we want. I'm rendering the batch now, will post the result soon...
Howgh!

Arandil

#6
Another basic question to add here, regarding animating clouds.  Am I correct in assuming that animating the x/y/z values in the transform shader (placed in series after a cloud layer) would animate cloud movement for all cloud layers above it?  Would the Atmosphere layer be impacted as a (higher) parent node, and if so, would you want to blend the Atmosphere and cloud layers in parallel after the transform shader node (or would that be "bad")?

Will

possably, For animating clouds you could alwys try connecting the transform to the fractil or what ever you have connected to it to give it shape.


Regards,

Will
The world is round... so you have to use spherical projection.

Arandil

Quote from: Will on February 28, 2007, 05:57:42 AM
possably, For animating clouds you could alwys try connecting the transform to the fractil or what ever you have connected to it to give it shape.

Regards,

Will

I like that approach better for a start, thanks!

Will

just to clairfy that I ment to connect the fractal to the transform and then to the cloud layer.

Regards,

Will
The world is round... so you have to use spherical projection.

Arandil

Quote from: Will on February 28, 2007, 06:36:11 AM
just to clairfy that I ment to connect the fractal to the transform and then to the cloud layer.

Regards,

Will

Gotcha.

Mohawk20

Howgh!

Arandil


Mohawk20

No, first stretch the y-axis, then add the x-, and z-axis together. From size 1 to size 15 in 90 frames :P
Howgh!

Mohawk20

Oshyan, you said allmost everything is animateable, and you are right.
I'm missing one thing... colour. It would be great if we could animate colour changes as well.
Then we could fastforward from summer to fall and see the leaves turn brown, or have a disco sun.
Howgh!