Search Tutorials
The Orbits Okay, you may be saying to yourself - 'I've spent a bit of time on this, and it's not raising my eyebrows so far. In fact, it's sitting there like a stunned mullet.' That is true. If you press play, nothing moves. How boring, huh? Well, now we bring the whole thing to life. We'll be using controllers and hierarchies within MAX to achieve our goal. We'll be going at breakneck speed, so grab your mouse, take a breath, here we go. First things first, let's animate the first two planets, and place them on their orbits. Select planet1(sphere2, if you haven't renamed them), and go to the MOTION panel on the top right.
You will see a tab underneath called ASSIGN CONTROLLER. Open it out by clicking on it. We're given some options to adjust or transform things - we can select POSITION, ROTATION, or SCALE. On the right of each transform, we can see what sort of CONTROLLER they are using. For example, POSITION is using a BEZIER POSITION controller (for the technically minded, this means that positions between keyframes are connected by curved bezier splines. This means, for example, a space ship will move smoothly between keyframes instead of mechanically, for example). We're going to change this to a PATH controller - basically, our orbit will become a path for this planet.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|