Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 15
Layout 2: Animation
Basics
This chapter explores the basic tools that
LightWave uses to control the movements
of items within an animation. While these
are the
tools
to control animation, they are
not the
skills
to create great works of ani-
mation. There's an entire topic (
LightWave
3D 8 Character Animation
) devoted to
understanding these skills — inverse kine-
matics, bones, weight mappings, and the
skills common to good animation, whether
hand-drawn on paper or created in
LightWave.
Note
As we go through this chapter, you'll see
that the tools LightWave offers to manipu-
late animations are rather complex. We've
already touched on some of them in Chap-
ter 2 while “dissecting” Layout. Throughout
this chapter, I'll be referring to things we
covered there.
Here, I'll give you a taste of some of the
things that are in store for you in the world
of animation. These are things that are
inte-
gral
to animation, but they are no more
animation itself than a cinema is the movies
it shows.
Keyframes (Keys)
The concept of
keyframes
comes from tradi-
tional animation (animation drawn on
paper). The animator draws the
primary
poses — the ones that define the action —
assigning the drawings positions on a
dope
sheet
(a spreadsheet that shows the position
in time of every drawing within a scene).
After the animator is happy with the defini-
tion of the action, the scene goes on to
other artists who fill in the drawings that
come in between the key drawings (cre-
atively called
inbetweens
).
A
keyframe
in LightWave is a record of
the position, rotation, and/or scale of an
item, whether it be an object, bone, light,
camera, etc. A keyframe is recorded in
LightWave when you change an item's
scaling, rotation, or position (if you have
Auto Key Create active) or by using Create
Key to manually create a keyframe.
How do animators know how much time
(how many frames) to put between their
keyframes? We use a stopwatch to time
either how long it takes for us to do an
action physically or how long the action
takes to play out in our imaginations.
The thing I never liked about stop-
watches is that I could never find one that
would give me the timings in frames (work-
ing in 30 FPS for NTSC or 24 FPS for film),
feet/frames, SMPTE, or whatever. (I had to
do all that “translation” in my head or on
