Category: Visual Effects

This week’s Top Tip comes from our fabulous Top Tip Magician, Senior Generalist Chris Scubli! He’s offering some helpful advice for how you can configure endless keyframes in 3dsMax:

Let’s say you need an endless animation for something like spinning propellers or phase keyframes for various effects like Wave or Noise modifiers. You could create keyframes at frame 0 and then 1000… but what if the shot length changes, or you need to adjust the speed quickly? It’s more effective to use ‘Out of Range’ types for these keyframes instead.

Take the example of a spinning propeller. At frame 0 we set a keyframe for rotation at 0 degrees. Then at frame 5 we apply a 360 spin on its Z axis. This would be perfect if your shot length is five frames, although it’s probably going to be longer.

So here’s one way of getting around the issue:

Right click the object and go to the ‘Curve Editor’.

Here we can see the keyframes for the rotation. Make sure they are linear, so the motion is constant. To do that, drag select the keys in the track view and then click ‘Set Tangents’ to ‘Linear’.

With the keys still selected, in the Curve Editor go to ‘Edit’, ‘Controller’, ‘Out of Range Types’. Activate both buttons underneath the Linear type. Now your keys will extend infinitely both ways in the track view.

This means the propeller will spin forever at the same speed, meaning your shot length or start time does not need you to adjust or slide keys around.

A handy trick now is that you can move the two keys closer or further apart to tweak the speed of the rotation.

Our fabulous CG Generalist Flora presents this week’s Top Tip, sharing a helping hand of knowledge for when it comes to colouring a realistic image!

Painting in greyscale is a great way to start learning and understanding the proper values of an image. Although, I found that starting with greyscale can be a real pain when it comes to creating a coloured illustration, because of the dangers of the indirect colourisation (this video explains why). Adding colours as early as possible is how I like my workflow and this Top Tip explains how I check my values along the way, using Photoshop’s interface.

You can switch the proof settings easily by using the shortcut ‘ctrl + Y’, which will take you from RGB to the Gamma 2.2 colour space instantly (you can use the same shortcut to also refer back to RGB).

Or if you have two computer screens or one very big one, you can then duplicate your work using ‘Window > Arrange > New window for’ option – It will create a second tab for the picture, so you will now be able to manage your workspace more effectively so that you can see both of the clones at the same time.

Be sure to keep the main image/window in RGB but switch the second one to Gamma 2.2.

As these windows are updated instantly, you will be able to see how everything you do on your main coloured picture affects the values of the whole piece.

A quick note: if you want to check your values using layers, it is always better to create a new layer on top, filled with pure black to then put in “colour” mode, instead of using the “hue/saturation” to desaturate your picture. The desaturate tool won’t give you actual values and can create problems if you use this to build up your image.