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Animation - moving the keys

A

artmartin

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us-arizona
Hey all. I've been trying to animate people inner tubing down a river and finding it nearly impossible to guage where to turn along with the bends in the river other than the old trial and error method. I tried placing a background image from a FS screen shot but getting it to be the right scale for the size of the object is beyond me. Anyway, what I'm running up against is that, after the error portion when you go back into GMAX to move the postions at the keys, I have no idea how to do that. When I try to reassign those positions it seems to move the entire animation instead of just the spot I'm working on.

It sure seems that I should be able to define a curving spline with points where I want the key frames and attach the Tick18 objects to them. I can see that GMAX seems to have that functionality but the docs assume you know way too much and just give you cursory info. Is there a tutorial somewhere for moving objects along a spline? I'm about to go into GMAX and place boxes where I want the curves and then draw the animation around them but that sounds like too much work. (Oh, and of course the river changes elevation as it meanders along just to add complication)

Art
 
Thanks Thorsten. Just where is Nick's tutorial on this? I haven't been able to find it.

Also, it appears that exporting the animation works only if the number of total frames divided by the frame rate is below a certain value. I haven't pinned that down yet. What's the magic number? I've seen some posts talking about 55 seconds of animation. Is that what we're aiming for?

Art
 
I fixed the link...

It should be noted that this tutorial was VERY rough... :) But it will give you the ideas....

You are limited to 1024 frames.
 
I had read other old posts that seemed to say the limit wasn't frames but number of seconds. That's why I added in the framerate part of the equation.

Art
 
Hi Art,

FS animation run at a fixed framerate of 18 Hz (the tick18 variable). So the length in seconds and the number of frames are linked. 1025 frames (0 to 1024) is about 55 seconds.
 
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