The continuous play of these frames in succession at a certain speed (said as frames per second or fps) helps us perceive jitter free motion or animation. This is the basic principle of animation everywhere. It means that if we want to animate a ball bouncing, we need to create 30 frames for a single second, and each frame showing the position of the ball at that time instant (1/30th of second). Oh dont worry about the frame mathematics. in 3D Studio MAX ( 3DS MAX ), things are much simpler. If you want to bounce a ball, lets say we need the animation to be visualized in 100 frames. We define the initial position of the ball at the 1st frame using a keyframe (thats what we call it in 3D Studio MAX ( 3DS MAX )). Now at around the 50th frame, we move the ball down to the floor where it bounces and set another keyframe. Again at the 100th frame, we set a keyframe with the ball up in the air (bounced). So we created just 3 keyframes defining the ball's key positions during the entire animation. 3D Studio MAX ( 3DS MAX ) interpolates all the remaining frames to make it a 100 frame long animation. Simple. Huh?

We are going to do exactly the same thing here in this lesson. Animate a ball bouncing. Shall we?

Since we need a ball and a floor to bounce on, we need to create those objects to make our scene before we can jump into the animation stuff. Create a new scene in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ). Reset it using File > Reset. Now create a floor using a box. Here we are not strict regarding the dimensions. Make a box to seem like a floor to bounce on. Refer to the illustrations on the right. Don't worry about the textures assigned. We will do that shorty. Now, create a sphere and place it above the floor to it's one extreme. See the Top view's image to know the positioning of the ball. Done? Well now let's assign some nice materials to both our floor and the ball in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ). Open Material Editor, select the first empty slot and click Get Material button . Within the Material Browser, choose Mtl_Library as source and from the list choose the material with name Wood_Burloak. Now the first slot contains the wood material. right? Now select the floor (box) and click on Assign Material to Selection in the Material Editor. Assign the material Fabric_Tan_Carpet to the second slot in the Material Editor and assign it to the sphere (ball) in the scene. All done? Great job. Now your scene in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ) should look like the figure given here

Save the scene under the name 'level4-ball-scene.max'. Let's learn how to make the ball bounce on the floor, in the next page of this tutorial