Animating Your Geometry - Lightning Fast Animation in Element 3D - page 71

Also, remember that X Rotation would have a similar graph (nothing is moved by
gravity linearly). So, go adjust that graph to make it look similar to the Y Position
graph shown in the preceding screenshot. Also, just for giggles, go adjust the Z
Position graph so that it looks smooth. It doesn't have to be like the other graphs,
just so that it doesn't snake all over the place.
Finally, if the lamp falls below the table's surface, the table would block the light.
However, as there's no ray tracing in Element 3D, we need to turn off the lights as
the lamp falls out of sight (else, the salt shakers and wine bottle will still be lit).
Set a hold keyframe on each of the lamp's light's intensity parameters at 20 seconds.
Then, at 21:15 (when the lamp hits the ground), set the intensity to zero percent (this
should automatically create another hold keyframe at this marker). Now, as soon as
the lamp hits the ground, the lights go out as shown in the following screenshot:
Summary
Ok, so we've got our lamp animated. Use the same techniques to animate your
shakers and wine bottle. Remember, we learned how to change the axis point using
another null that we can parent our object's null to. For instance, if you want to have
the wine bottle fall over on the table and roll, just add a null at the bottom corner,
animate that falling over, and then use the object's null (at the center of the object)
to animate the rolling on the table. You can combine this technique in a lot of ways.
Play around and create your own animations for the bottle and shakers.
We also learned about different keyframe interpolations ( hold and Bezier ). With
Bezier curves, we can get much more control over how things move than we get with
simple eases (as we saw while using the graph editor). We also talked about getting
some realism when using these techniques. When we get into some more advanced
techniques (in Chapter 9 , Some Other Techniques ), we'll go further into adding realism
with bounces, squashing and stretching soft bodies, and so on. We'll also delve further
into masking our shaker scene and optimizing our render in Chapter 8 , Optimizing
Performance . So don't worry; we'll come back to the shaker aniation and really make
it sing later.
In the next chapter, we're going to set aside our shaker animation for a bit and move
into an area where Element 3D really shines. Let's tackle the particle replicator.