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Animating the Fire, Lights & scene in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ) - Tutorial / Lesson
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In this chapter, we are going to animate the fire effect, lighting, the duck and the camera movement in the room scene. You will learn many techniques that will be useful in a variety of situations. Open the scene 'chap10-fireplace.max'. (Download the scene here if you don't have it). Save the scene under a new name 'chap11-room-animated.max'
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| -Animating the Fire in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ) - Tutorial / Lesson |
In the last lesson, you learned how to create fire using the fire effect in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ). But the fire that we created was not animated. Animating the fire is simple. Click on Rendering> Environment from the main menu bar and select the fire effect that we created in the last lesson from the list. Within the parameters, you can see the Motion subcategory . It has two parameters - Phase and Drift. You animate these parameters in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ) for animating the fire. Animating the Phase value in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ) , causes the fire samples to wave, whereas animating the drift causes simulation of the flames moving up.
Click on the Auto Key button to turn automatic keying on in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ). Now make sure that the time slider is at Frame 0. With the Auto Key mode turned on, move the time slider to the last frame and change the value of Phase to 300 and Drift to 200. Once you change these values, you will notice that a red boundary surrounds the value fields signifying that they are being animated in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ). This happened because, while you changed the values, the Auto Key mode was turned on in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ). Simply drag the time slider to and fro to see the values changing with time. Now the fire is animated. But you can see the effect of the animation, only if you render the whole scene into a file and play it back, which we will do later.
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| Animating the Light in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ) - Tutorial / Lesson |
In the case of fireplaces in the real world, the lighting in the immediate neighbourhood fluctuates a great deal due to the flame motion. We can simulate this effect in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ) by animating the light that we have placed just over the fire sticks. Click on the Omni at the centre of the gizmo, just over the sticks to select it. Go to the Modify panel. Now turn Auto Key on. Move the time slider to frame 5. Set the multiplier value in the modify panel as 3. Go to frame 15 and change the multiplier value to 1. Frame 18 - multiplier value: 3. Frame 20 - multiplier value: 2. Frame 23 - multiplier value: 2.5, Frame 25 - multiplier value: 2.
Now we have created a series of keys that changes the multiplier value over a range that in fact is a cycle (starting and ending multiplier values: 2). This cycle can be repeated over the entire animation sequence to stimulate the light fluctuation in 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ). We can make the short cycle of key frames to repeat by using the track view. Open the Track view by clicking Graph Editors > Track View - Curve Editor. Make sure that the Omni is the one presently selected in the scene. In the left-hand side of the track view, expand the Object (Omni Light) group by clicking on the + symbol to its left. Within the expanded hierarchy, click Multiplier. This displays the change in multiplier values in the track view as a graph. You can see that the graph ends at frame 25.
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In the toolbar located at the top region of the Track View you will find the button named Parameter Curve-out-of-range types  towards the right most end (Move the mouse pointer over it to display the names). Click on it. A dialog box appears, showing that the currently selected pattern is Constant, which means that the frames don't repeat.
Click on both the small buttons, just below the category named Loop so that it gets depressed. See the figure. Now click OK. This causes the keyframes that were displayed in the track view to get repeated as a loop. This will be visible in the track view, which is shown as a dotted continuation of the original graph that now spans over the entire time range. This results in the light fluctuation to get repeated over the whole 3D Studio MAX ( 3ds max ) animation sequence. This technique comes very handy at times.
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Save the scene. Lets continue with animation in the next page of this tutorial.
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