| Animating a camera in 3D Studio MAX ( 3DS MAX ) - Tutorial / Lesson |
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We have discussed the fundamentals of keyframe animation in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ) in the last few pages. Now lets extend our scene a bit. Lets put a camera into the scene, animate it, add a few lights and render the whole scene as an animation. It will be just a cakewalk for you. Simply follow my instructions carefully.
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Create a Free Camera in the 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ) scene by going to the Create Panel and then choosing Cameras  . Choose the Free Camera and click some around the center of the Front Viewport. The creation in the Front view situates the camera in the most favourable orientation. Now select the Perspective viewport by Right-clicking on some blank space inside it. Now press ' C ' in your keyboard to switch the view to the camera you just created. Now the 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ) viewport shows the view through our Free Camera. You can't see anything in it right? Just use the Dolly Camera  tool from the camera/viewport tools and click drag within the viewport downwards, to zoom out the view. Refer back to Chapter 2 tutorials to brush up your memory. Perform the Dolly till the ball bouncing scene is fully visible through the camera.
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Now move the Time Slider in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ) to frame 0 (left most end). We are going to animate the camera. First zoom out and rotate the camera view using the camera handling tools, to get a view shown in the first figure. This will be the position of the camera in the 0th frame. Take your time to get a similar view, but keep in mind that you need not be a perfectionist in this. You can use Orbit, Dolly, Truck tools in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ) to get the desired view. Or you can use the Move and Rotate tools to directly move and rotate the camera's icon in a viewport (recommends Top view)
We have fixed the position of the camera in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ), but haven't set a keyframe yet. First make sure that the Camera is the currently selected object in the scene. Use Select by Name tool to select it if it is not the currently selected item. Now lets use the Auto Key feature to learn it. Shall we? Click on the Auto Key button to toggle Autokey mode in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ). The time bar and the button should have turned red now, signalling that the animation mode is on. In Auto Key mode we can create a keyframe simply by right clicking on the Time slider. It pops up the Create key dialog. The key will be created for the currently selected object in the frame where the time slider now points to.
Make sure that camera is currently selected and that the Time slider points to the zeroth frame (reads 0/50)  . Now right click on the Time Slider in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ). It opens up the Create key dialog. Simply click OK. This creates a key at the 0th frame. Now move the Time slider to the 50th frame. Here we are going to use the Auto Key feature of 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ). Dolly and pan the camera to get a view as shown on the second figure. Since the Auto Key is on, all the changes you make to the camera (dollying, panning etc indirectly moves and rotates the camera) gets keyframed at the current frame (50th frame). Hence we needn't set a key manually.
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Lets continue with the camera animation in the next page of this tutorial
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