Animation in Swift 3D - Page 14

Animation in this software is so easy that it is hardly worth mentioning the basics. We are going to incorporate a group of objects and a single object into the animation, each of which will move independently.

If you will recall the finished animation this project is intended to rebuild, there is a line of spaceships in the spaceship slow lane (moving slowly, all at the same pace) and one spaceship in the spaceship-pool lane going very fast. The first step is to lay out the ships as they will appear in the first frame of animation.

Using the copy and paste in top view, create an array of spaceships as shown in Figure 20-17. Notice that when you paste an object, it is in the same location as the copied object. This makes it easy to compose a line of objects with two sets of coordinates in common. Don't forget to apply a fast color to the fast spaceship.

SHIFT-select all the gray spaceships. You can't draw a marquee, since dragging in the open viewport causes it to pan. With all the gray ships highlighted, select Arrange | Group or press ALT- G. You now have a group of objects. This group will move as a single object when it is animated.

This is all the preparation that is required to produce the animation. With the group of gray spaceships selected, move the playhead on the timeline to frame 30, as shown in Figure 20-18.

You have to select the group of spaceships because each object has a parallel timeline. Selecting an object or group is how you tell Swift 3D that you want to edit the transformation of that object or group for that particular frame on the timeline. Right- click and drag your viewport to a very wide perspective and move the group of gray spaceships to where you think they should be at the end of the animation. This is easy to adjust if you don't like the result after you get the camera set up, so don't spend too much time worrying about it.

Next move the red ship to its position in frame 30. If it is going to go faster, it has to travel farther in the same amount of time, so move it far ahead of the group. Notice that the timeline automatically updates itself with keyframes and a green bar, representing a tweened parameter (location in this case). Figure 20-19 shows what your timeline should look like with either the red ship or the group of gray spaceships selected.

At this point, you should be able to play back the animation in one of the viewports and get a feel for how the action flows. Depending on your machine, you may need to switch to Outline display in the Layout portion of the property tools palette in order to keep up. Click Apply to make the change take effect.

Cameras

If you switch to rotating view in one of your viewports, the default view will be set to front, which is almost perfect for the starting point of our animated camera. Move the playhead to frame 1 and drag the viewport so that you are looking down the center, between the two lanes of traffic, just above where the spaceships will pass. Switch to camera pan mode by selecting Edit | Camera Pan Mode or simply by clicking on that button on the main toolbar. If there are any keyframes on the timeline when you are in camera pan mode initially, delete them by right-clicking on the timeline and selecting Delete All Keyframes.

When in camera pan mode, every transformation you make applies to the camera instead of the models in the scene. Notice that the trackball now shows arrows, which represent the current orientation of the camera.

Move the playhead to frame 20 on the timeline. This is where the camera will stop following the fast spaceship because it has whooshed by too quickly to keep up. This is a cinematography trick that is approximately 12 years older than the hills — the closer you are to something when it goes by, the faster it appears to go.

Change the constrain angle measure on the trackball to 10 degrees and rotate it straight down until you have the red car in your camera in this frame. If you have to adjust the position of the red car at this point, be careful and think about what you are doing before you go grabbing things.

First of all, don't grab objects from within your camera view. Keep another viewport open for this. In this animation, the right view makes the most sense. Your camera should remain in camera pan mode, and the individual viewports will remember this state. In other words, at this point in the animation, you can activate the right view, and the camera pan button on the main toolbar will automatically toggle off. When you go back to the rotating view (your camera), the camera pan view button remembers its state and toggles back on until you turn it off.

Next, don't break up your tween without good reason. If you need to move the position of the red ship in frame 20, move its position in frame 30 in right view.

Finally, render your animation by selecting File | Export. The rendering engine is very efficient; you will probably have your finished SWF within a couple minutes. While it is rendering, you can't use the rest of the components of the Swift 3D package (you can't work on your animation or a model within it, but you can edit). Nor can you choose to render on a machine to which you are networked. This should be incentive enough for you to keep your movies small, which users at the end of a 28.8kbps line will appreciate.

Introduction to Swift 3D - Page 13
Macromedia Flash 5 Developer's Guide
Primitive Character Animation - Page 15