Essential LightWave 3D- P14 doc

Our animation will be 1.75 seconds, so using The Itty-Bitty Animation Timer to convert 1.75 sec-onds into frames enter 42 as your End Frame in both the Frame Slider and the Render Option

From here, you can continue to reshape the

ear to your satisfaction Figure 14-147

shows the completed ear

Zoom out and take a look at what you’ve

got The head model should be at least 93%

complete or better If you find that it’s notquite right, I encourage you to continueworking with it Being willing to push pastthe point of mediocrity is often what turns agood model into a great one

Figure 14-147: The finished ear.

Figure 14-148: The finished head.

Closing Thoughts

We’ve covered a tremendous amount of

ground in this chapter, from the proper

techniques of building a spline cage to

refin-ing the mesh and addrefin-ing in complex details

In the process, you’ve constructed a

world-class head model From here, I

encourage you to continue on Begin

constructing morph targets for facial tion Build the rest of the body and use theinformation in Chapters 15 and 16 to getstarted in character animation Let thework you’ve done in this chapter be thestart of great things as you continue to real-ize your dreams in 3D

anima-Layout 2: Animation Basics

This chapter explores the basic tools that

LightWave uses to control the movements

of items within an animation While these

are the tools to control animation, they are

not the skills to create great works of

ani-mation There’s an entire book (LightWave

3D 8 Character Animation) devoted to

understanding these skills — inverse

kine-matics, bones, weight mappings, and the

skills common to good animation, whether

hand-drawn on paper or created in

LightWave

Note

As we go through this chapter, you’ll see that the tools LightWave offers to manipu- late animations are rather complex We’ve already touched on some of them in Chap- ter 2 while “dissecting” Layout Throughout this chapter, I’ll be referring to things we covered there.

Here, I’ll give you a taste of some of thethings that are in store for you in the world

of animation These are things that are

inte-gral to animation, but they are no more

animation itself than a cinema is the movies

it shows

Keyframes (Keys)

The concept of keyframes comes from

tradi-tional animation (animation drawn on

paper) The animator draws the primary

poses — the ones that define the action —

assigning the drawings positions on a dope

sheet (a spreadsheet that shows the position

in time of every drawing within a scene)

After the animator is happy with the

defini-tion of the acdefini-tion, the scene goes on to

other artists who fill in the drawings that

come in between the key drawings

(cre-atively called inbetweens).

A keyframe in LightWave is a record of

the position, rotation, and/or scale of an

item, whether it be an object, bone, light,

camera, etc A keyframe is recorded in

LightWave when you change an item’sscaling, rotation, or position (if you haveAuto Key Create active) or by using CreateKey to manually create a keyframe

How do animators know how much time(how many frames) to put between theirkeyframes? We use a stopwatch to timeeither how long it takes for us to do anaction physically or how long the actiontakes to play out in our imaginations.The thing I never liked about stop-watches is that I could never find one thatwould give me the timings in frames (work-ing in 30 FPS for NTSC or 24 FPS for film),feet/frames, SMPTE, or whatever (I had to

do all that “translation” in my head or on

paper.) So, I wrote a little utility in Flash

that serves as an animation timer and

unit-conversion utility

The Itty-Bitty Animation Timer looks

simple but packs a lot of power Click on the

icon at the center to time how long you hold

the mouse button down Click Frames,

Feet/Frames, SMPTE, or Seconds to see

your time displayed in that format You can

manually enter any value for any field, and

press <Return> to update the calculations

(this is how you change your FPS or add a

frame offset if you’re timing part of an

action that doesn’t start on frame 0)

Note

You can find more information on The

Itty-Bitty Animation Timer, along with a

whole slew of other plug-ins, programs, and

utilities, in Appendix A.

1 Load

Objects\Chapter15\Anima-tion.lwo We’ll be doing a little “flying

logo” work with this bit of text

Figure 15-1: The Itty-Bitty Animation Timer.

Figure 15-2

The worlds of broadcasting and advertising

are cyclical At the time of publication,

pref-erences have leaned toward 3D that doesn’t

look “3D” (i.e., no hugely thick block letters).

Keep this in mind if you’re putting together a

reel to get hired doing this kind of work.

Generally, it isn’t a good idea to have things

that look outdated on your reel — keep up

with what’s current.

2 We’ll be working in 24 frames per

sec-ond, so make sure that you’ve got this

set under General Options | Frames

Per Second Our animation will be

1.75 seconds, so (using The Itty-Bitty

Animation Timer to convert 1.75

sec-onds into frames) enter 42 as your End

Frame in both the Frame Slider and the

Render Options fields Take a moment

to make sure you have both parts of

Auto Key Create active! (You’ll have to

develop your own preferences as to

whether your moving an item will

cre-ate keys on only the channels in which

it is moved or on all channels at once.)

cur-3 Making sure you’re still on frame 0,move the text along the negative Z axisuntil it is just a tiny bit “behind” thecamera (as shown in Figure 15-3, thecamera “sees” from an invisible point

in the center of its icon) You will also

want to move the text a little bit in thenegative X axis so the camera is

between the “m” and “a” in the word

“Animation.”

Figure 15-3

Clicking and dragging on an item’s handles

will restrict movement, rotation, or scaling to

one axis It makes precise positioning much

easier, especially when working in a

Per-spective viewport (Make sure you have

Display Options | Show Handles active.)

4 Now, we’re going to get into some

actual animation Moving the Frame

Slider to frame 6, move your text

toward the positive Z axis so it just

barely fills the “title safe” area (see

Chapter 2 if necessary) in a Camera

viewport You’ll also want to move the

text to X=0 so it’s centered again

(Now you can move the Frame Slider

back and forth between 0 and 6 and

watch the text come zooming in from

behind the camera.)

5 Press <f> to bring up the Go to Frame dialog and enter 36, as shown in Figure

15-5 Move the text toward the positive

Z axis by about another meter at frame

36 (This will keep the text “alive”while the viewers are reading what itsays.)

Figure 15-4

6 Now go to frame 42 (the end of our

scene), and enter the value of 200 m

for that frame’s Z position (This will

make the text “zoom off” into the

distance.)

Hey! You’re animating! (Well, you’re

start-ing to at least.) When you “scrub” the

Frame Slider back and forth, you’ll see that

the text “bounces” backward, going

“behind” the camera again between frames

6 and 36 It didn’t do this before when we

scrubbed through our frames in Figure 15-4

This is not what we want our text to do.

LightWave will interpolate (inbetween)

from keyframe to keyframe smoothly with

mathematical perfection Its default mode of

interpolation is a kind of spline (spatial line) known as a TCB spline (which stands for

tension, continuity, and bias) This kind of

spline is affected heavily by large, quickmotions that come immediately before or

after a keyframe (just like we’ve got

between frames 0 and 6) The solution toour bouncing text is to either add morekeyframes or manually adjust the interpola-tion to make the “inbetweening” exactlywhat we want for our motion LightWave’s

Graph Editor will let us “sculpt” the

func-tion curves that control every aspect of an

item’s motion — and more!

Figure 15-5

Figure 15-6

“Motion” Graph Editor

Below the File pop-up menu on the

upper-left side of the Layout interface is the

Graph Editor button Clicking on it will

open the “Motion” Graph Editor for your

selected item (The Graph Editor controls a

lot more than just motions now, though at

one time that’s all it did, and so us

“old-tim-ers” still sometimes call it by its original

name: “Motion Graph.”)

Every aspect of an item’s motion and

every “envelopable” attribute is controlled

through this interface Press <a> to Zoom

All and <A> to Zoom Selected (There’s so

much here that I’m going to just hit the

high points and leave the details to the LW

manual.)

• On the left side, the Channels list

shows all the aspects that LW is tracking for

the currently selected item Click on one

channel to view and edit it in the Graph

area, or Shift-click or Ctrl-click to select

more than one channel to view and modify

at once

• Double-click on an item under the

Channels tab (just under the Channels list)

to change what item’s curves you are

view-ing (without havview-ing to close the window,

select the new item, and reopen the GraphEditor) Shift-double-click to add an item’schannels to the list you are currentlyviewing

• The Graph area itself is where you

right-click and drag to create a boundingbox for selecting multiple keyframes orleft-click and drag to modify them (Thesame hot key and mouse combinationsyou’re used to in Modeler will work here aswell to zoom and scroll the view.)

• Just below the Graph area are theGraph Editor’s tool buttons From the left

are Move Keys, Add Keys, Stretch

Keys, Roll Keys, and Zoom (Left-click

and drag affects the selected keys’ value,

while Ctrl-left-click and drag affects the

selected keys’ frames.)

• Frame is an input field that shows the

frame on which your currently selectedkeyframe is located

• Value tells you the selected key on the

selected channel’s precise location (In ure 15-7, we are looking only at the “curve”for the Z position for the item named Ani-mation On the selected frame, 6, it is atprecisely –2.3195 m along the Z axis.)

Fig-Figure 15-7: The Graph Editor.

• Pre Behavior and Post Behavior tell

LightWave what to do before it reaches the

item’s first keyframe and after it reaches its

last keyframe (respectively)

• Constant (as shown in the figure)

holds the value of the first key for

“infinity” before the first keyframe

begins and/or the value of the last key

for “infinity” after the last keyframe

• Reset sets the value of the graph

to 0 when it has no more keys with

which to work

• Repeat plays the series of keys

over and over again, ad infinitum.

• Oscillate “ping-pongs” the

anima-tion set by the keys, reversing it when

it reaches the end and playing it

for-ward once again when it returns to the

beginning

• Offset Repeat repeats the motion

but with everything shifted by the

dif-ference between the first and last keys

(this would make our curve here into

an infinite set of “stairs”)

• Linear continues the curve

infinitely, projecting it at an angle

established by the last two keys (or

first two keys, if we’re talking about

Pre Behavior)

• Incoming Curve tells LightWave how

to handle the curve segment that is directly

to the left of the selected key.

• TCB Spline is LightWave’s

de-fault setting, and it gives good results

most of the time, without having to

worry about tweaking the curves

much (Tension, Continuity, and Bias all

affect the shape of the curve, based on

values from –1 to +1 Of these, I have

only ever found myself needing to use

Tension, and then only to put in a value

of +1 to get an item to ease into or out

of its keyed position.)

• Hermite Spline gives you little

“handles” that extend from the key,allowing you to visually control theshape of the curve (It isn’t quite as

controllable as a bezier spline.)

Alt-dragging on one of these handles will

let you split it from its partner, so it isnot a mirror of the handle on the other

side of the key Double-clicking on a

handle that has been split will get it toonce again mirror the angle of the han-dle on the other side of the key

• Bezier Spline also gives you

han-dles, but you can move the position ofthese handles a great distance relative

to their respective keys, giving you a

lot more control (Alt-dragging and

double-clicking on these handles splits

and reunites the handles with theirpartners, just as with Hermite Splinehandles.)

• Linear gives you a straight line

inbetween from the previous keyframe

• Stepped holds the value of the

previous key until the moment beforethe stepped key, so it goes right fromone value to the next without any kind

of inbetweening (like what a traditionalanimation “pencil test” looks likebefore it goes to the assistant anima-tors who put in the “missing” frames)

• The Footprints drop-down (located

along the top row of pop-up menus) lets youchoose among several options: Leave Foot-print, Backtrack Footprint, and PickupFootprint Leave Footprint places a bit of a

“ghosted” image of how your curve lookedwhen you left the footprint You can use this

as a visual reference to help you as youtweak If you totally mangle things, you canuse Backtrack Footprint to get back to the

way things were If you like how things are,

you can choose Pickup Footprint

(Foot-prints only last until you close the Graph

Editor window, use Pickup Footprint, or

select a different item’s curves.)

1 Let’s go back to where we were at the

end of the last section With the text

object selected, open the Graph Editor

and select its Position Z channel.

Right-drag a rectangle around all the

keys, and set Incoming Curve to

Bezier Spline Double-click on the

handles shown to get them to mirror

their shorter partners

Note

All these controls, buttons, and gizmos in the Graph Editor may seem like overkill, but believe me, everything here has a purpose, and though you may not need one of these bits of functionality much, when you do need it, you’ll be thankful it’s there Bear in

mind that this is only scratching the surface.

The Graph Editor is the animator’s most trusted and versatile tool Its spline types, handles, footprints, you name it — all of it lets you have the minimum number of keys

to hold your animation in place.

Figure 15-8

Figure 15-9

2 Drop your selection Then select only

the keys on frames 6 and 36 (still

work-ing with the Position Z channel) Press

<A> to Zoom Selected, and tweak the

handles until you have a nice, smooth

slope between the two keys Minimize

the Graph Editor window, and play your

animation to see the difference

Animation controls are available in thelower-right corner of the interface (SeeFigure 2-82.) If the playback seems too fast

or too slow, make sure you have Play at

Exact Rate active under the General

Options

Adjusting Timing

The animation we’ve just created looks

good, but you may notice that the logo

“pops” onto the screen a little too abruptly

Let’s take a look at a few different ways in

which we can tinker with timing to refine

our animation

The two primary tools for adjusting

tim-ing are the Dope Track and Dope Sheet

The Dope Track can be accessed from the

main interface Its cousin, the Dope Sheet,

can be found in the Scene Editor Both offer

a similar, yet slightly different set of tools

for adjusting the timing of your animations

Let’s do some fine-tuning using the

Dope Track Click on the textured portion

of the gray bar just above the main timeline

This will open the Dope Track

You’ll notice that a second timeline

appears, complete with a duplicate set of

keyframes The difference between these

keys and the ones found in the main

timeline, however, is that they can be

dragged to different locations, cut, copied,

pasted, and “baked” to create keys for theinbetween frames

Looking at our timeline we can see thatthe logo takes six frames to appearonscreen At 24 frames per second, that’sonly ¼ of a second for the logo to appear.Let’s give the “on” motion a little moretime

1 Click on the key at frame 6 in the DopeTrack A white rectangle will appeararound the top of this keyframe, indi-cating it has been selected

2 Click and drag left and right to movethe keyframe As you can see, thekeyframe can be moved to any location

on the timeline, even past existingkeys For now, drag the key to frame 10and let go

3 Using the playback controls, take a look

at the adjustments you’ve made Thosefour extra frames make quite a bit of

Figure 15-10: Opening the Dope Track.

difference! That brings me to my next

point

In animation, just as in film and video

edit-ing, timing is crucial The difference of a

few frames can literally make or break a

scene That’s why features like the Dope

Track are so vitally important They make it

easy for us to fine-tune the timing of

indi-vidual elements in our scene Let’s take a

look at some of the other features available

in the Dope Track

Keyframes can be added to the timeline

simply by double-clicking The values for

the new key will be taken from those found

at the location of the Frame Slider

1 Move the Frame Slider to frame 42

2 Now move your mouse over frame 20

in the Dope Track and double-click A

new keyframe will be created

3 Play the scene using the playback

con-trols You’ll notice that the logo now

jumps back on the Z axis at frame 20

Markers can be placed on the Dope Track

to identify specific locations They can even

be labeled to provide greater clarity as to

the purpose of each marker

1 Holding the <Shift> key down,

double-click the timeline at frame 20

where we just created the new key Amarker will be created

2 Drag your Frame Slider over to frame

20 You’ll notice that the marker turnsyellow

3 Right-click on the Dope Track and

select Set Marker Text from the

pop-up menu In the requester that

appears, type the name ZoomZoom.

This will remind us that on thiskeyframe, the logo is zooming to the

back Press OK in the requester.

4 A marker label now appears in the infofield to the bottom left of the timeline(see Figure 15-11)

At this point we can move our key awayfrom frame 20 and still have a visualreminder of its original location I don’treally want the ZoomZoom keyframe, how-ever, so let’s delete it

1 Click the key we created at frame 20 toselect it Now right-click This brings

up a context-sensitive pop-up menu

2 Scroll down and select the Delete

Keys option.

3 The logo will immediately jump ward again, as the key that pushed itback has been removed

for-Figure 15-11

When the Frame Slider is over a marker, it

will obscure the keyframe indicator If it

doesn’t appear that your keyframe has been

deleted, simply move the Frame Slider away

from the marker.

Since we deleted the ZoomZoom keyframe,

we no longer need its marker either

1 Move the Frame Slider to frame 20

The marker will turn yellow This tells

us that we can perform functions on

this marker

2 Right-click to bring up the pop-up

menu Choose the Delete Marker

option

Our animation is looking better, but there’s

still room for improvement Let’s make the

logo’s motion a little more dynamic

1 Move the Frame Slider to frame 0

Click the Rotate tool from the Modify

| Rotate menu or press the keyboard

shortcut <y> You’ll notice that the

Quick-Info display now shows controls

for heading (H), pitch (P), and bank (B)

2 Click in the Bank field and replace the

0 with 10 Then press <Enter> to

accept the value This rotates our logo

10° on its Bank channel (Figure 15-12)

Drag the Frame Slider or use the playbackcontrols to see the result of this change.You’ll notice that the logo is cocked at aconstant 10° angle Since the only keyframefor rotation was at frame 0, modifying itcaused the change to remain in effectthroughout the duration of the animation.This is nice, but not quite what we wanted

1 Move the Frame Slider to frame 10.This is the frame at which the logo hasmoved completely onscreen and restsbriefly before flying off

2 Click in the Bank field and replace the

10 with a 0 Press <Enter> to accept

the results and play back youranimation

Ah! Much better! But there’s still room forimprovement I want the rotation to endjust before the logo comes to rest at frame

10 In order to achieve this, I need to movethe keyframe for the Bank channel so that it

is offset slightly from the logo’s XYZmotion If you look at the Dope Track, how-ever, you’ll notice that there’s no way toadjust the rotation keyframe independently

of the position keyframe Or is there?Right-click on the Dope Track and scrollall the way to the bottom of the pop-up

menu Select Channel Edit Mode You’ll

notice that the keyframes on the Dope

Figure 15-12

Track are no longer represented by solid

yellow lines Instead, they are made up of

three small bars colored red, green, and

blue These correspond to the individual X,

Y, Z or H, P, B channels of our object

Take a look at frame 0 (You should still

have the Rotate tool active.) The three bars

tell us that there are keyframes here for

heading, pitch, and bank Now take a look at

frame 10 Since the only adjustment to this

frame was in the Bank channel, the red and

green bars for heading and pitch are absent

Instead, we find a single blue bar

represent-ing our logo’s bank depicted here

Just as a quick comparison, select the

Move tool by pressing the <t> keyboard

shortcut You’ll notice that the keyframes

changed You see, the Channel Edit mode is

context sensitive When the Move tool is

selected, the Dope Track will show keys for

the X, Y, and Z position However, when the

Rotate tool is selected, it will show keys for

the H, P, and B rotation

Take a look at the Quick-Info display Do

you see the X, Y, and Z buttons? Even if a

channel is present (i.e., keyframes exist for

it), you can limit the Dope Track’s ability to

tweak it by deselecting its button in the

Quick-Info display Try turning on and off

the different channels to see how it affects

the Dope Track When you’re finished, turn

on all of the position channels again Then

switch back to the Rotate tool We’re going

to adjust the Bank channel independently torefine the logo’s “on” motion

1 Make sure that the Rotate tool is active

by pressing the <y> keyboard

short-cut Then click on the key at frame 10.This is the keyframe that we created torestore our logo’s rotation to 0 degrees

By moving this keyframe, we canadjust the timing of that rotation

2 Drag the key for this channel left anddrop it at frame 8 Then, using the play-back controls, preview your animation.(See Figure 15-13.)

This is much better! The logo now movesonscreen and finishes rotating slightlybefore its “on” motion is complete It hov-ers briefly, then shoots off out of view

Note

Keep in mind that the settings I give you here are just a guide Feel free to experi- ment with different locations for each keyframe Remember, you are the artist The look and feel of this animation is entirely up

to you!

Our animation is just about finished Butbefore we wrap up this section, let’s take aquick look at the Dope Sheet Press

<Ctrl> + <F1> or choose Scene Editor

| Open from the main menu The Dope

Figure 15-13

Sheet can be found on the tab at the right

side of the Scene Editor

The blocks in the Dope Sheet represent

keyframes By default, the blocks for

objects appear in blue, the blocks for

cam-eras appear in green, and the blocks for

lights appear in magenta You can click on

any of these blocks to select it, or click and

drag to define a range Once a keyframe or

range of frames is selected, you can move

and scale it at will

1 Click on frame 10 of the animation

object to select it Yellow borders will

appear around the left, right, and top of

the frame These denote the

bound-aries of the current selection

2 Click and drag to move the key to

frame 20 You’ll notice that a gray box

has been left on the key’s original

frame This gray box acts as a marker,

making it easy for you to return the

key to its starting position should you

find the change unsatisfactory

3 You’ll also notice that there are

play-back controls at the bottom right of the

Scene Editor Press Play to preview

your animation If needed, minimize

the Scene Editor or move it out of the

way, but do not close it yet (Figure

15-14)

Moving this keyframe didn’t really helpanything Let’s return it to its originalposition

1 Bring up the Scene Editor again Since

we did not close it, the frame wemoved should still be highlighted

2 Click and drag the keyframe until itrests over the gray box at frame 10

So far, we’ve been adjusting keyframes forall channels just as we did in the DopeTrack But it is possible to adjust thekeyframes for individual channels as well.The C+ icon to the left of each item allowsyou to expand an object to see its individualchannels

The red, green, and blue blocks here aresimply larger versions of the ones we saw

in the Dope Track The keyframes for vidual channels can be moved, cut, copied,pasted, and scaled

indi-1 Left-click on the animation object’sPosition X red key at frame 10

2 Hold the <Shift> key down and click

on the Position Y key at frame 36 Thisselects the entire range of frames forthe X and Y channels

3 Note the solid yellow bar on the far leftand right sides of the selection

Dragging this bar allows you to tively scale the selection

interac-Figure 15-14