- The animation frame rate
or time base is set in the time configuration dialogue.
It's a button at the very bottom
of the main window next to all the transform controls.
It's a button that looks like a clock with a gear,
time configuration.
Click on that to open the dialogue
where we can set up our frame rate,
the length of our current animation and so on.
And the upper left is the frame rate section.
And it's got some archaic initials up here, NTSC, PAL,
and also a button labeled Film.
I recommend that you stay away from these three buttons
because they're either antiquated or ambiguous.
NTSC stands for National Television Standards Committee.
It's the former analog television standard
from the United States.
If you choose NTSC, then 3da Max will run
at 30 frames per second, but that is technically inaccurate
because NTSC color television actually runs
at 29.9 frames per second.
Only the ancient black and white NTSC standard
from the 1950s actually ran at 30 frames per second.
3ds Max unfortunately is not currently capable
of a fractional frame rate.
If you're working in a broadcast environment
that may cause some headaches with synchronization
where 3ds max runs at 30 FPS,
but all of your other footage and hardware runs at 29.97.
Then we come to PAL,
which is the former analog television standard
from the United Kingdom,
and it was widely used in Western Europe.
This is the least ambiguous option of those three
because PAL runs at precisely 25 frames per second.
So there's no confusion there.
Now Film is confusing because if we choose Film
then 3ds Max will adopt a frame rate of 24 frames second,
but that is completely USA centric,
because historically the frame rate
for celluloid film in Europe
has always been 25 frames per second, just like PAL.
So the term film here is misleading.
Additionally, if we choose any of these three options
the interface will not tell us
what the actual frame rate is anywhere.
No matter which of these three options we choose,
the FPS field down here will not change,
that field is grayed out,
and it only becomes active when we choose the Custom option.
And that is exactly what I recommend.
If you choose Custom,
you can enter a numeric value for the frames per second.
You'll know for certain what your frame rate is,
with no ambiguity or confusion, just choose Custom
and plug in the frame rate you need.
Now, the cool thing about 3ds Max
and most 3d programs is that you can change the frame rate
without changing the time duration of the animation.
If I want to go for a European standard,
I could put in 25 frames per second here.
Now I'm going to type in 25 and press Enter.
But watch what happens down here
in the time slider or the timeline.
We'll give it a value of 25 FPS and press Enter.
The time slider or timeline changed.
A second ago we had 100 frames, now we have 83 frames.
3ds Max resampled that at segment of time
at 25 frames per second, instead of 30, very cool.
So I'm going to go back to 30 frames per second.
Type in 30 and press Enter.
And now we're back at 100 frames in the timeline.
The mechanism that allows for this
is that 3ds Max subdivides time
into tiny segments known as ticks.
We see the word ticks up here in the time display section.
There are 4,800 ticks in a second.
That is the internal time base
or the absolute resolution of time.
The number 4,800 was chosen because it's divisible
by common frame rates such as 24 and 25.
And that's what allows us to switch the frame rate
without changing the total time.
Moving on, we have the playback section,
and there are a couple things I want to point out.
First is the real time option that is enabled by default.
And we usually want to leave it enabled
so that the viewports will play back
at the current frame rate.
Then we have active viewport only, when that's on,
only the currently selected viewport will update
during animation playback.
So updating all of the views makes playback run more slowly.
So this is a performance consideration,
when this is on the playback will run more quickly.
But my recommendation
is that the active viewport only option should be disabled.
I like to turn that off so that all of the viewports
will update when we play an animation,
won't matter which viewport we currently have selected.
If you're concerned with this, you can enable statistic
in your viewport with the seven key
and that will display the current frame rate.
If the displayed FPS value is lower
than the current frame rate for the scene,
then Max is dropping frames during playback.
In that case you have the option to disable real time
over here in the time configuration.
If real time is disabled, then every frame will be displayed
no matter how long it takes,
even if that means playing back the animation
at a lower frame rate.
And that is actually very important in certain situations
such as fast moving animation or dynamic simulations.
If the timeline is either skipping frames or running slower
than real time, either you can lighten the load
on your scene by hiding objects or whatever,
or if that's not an option you can simply render
a draft quality preview animation.
I'll close the time configuration dialogue
just to show you that.
If you go to the Tools menu.
Under Preview, grab Viewport.
In the cascading menu
you can choose create preview animation.
And this provides the ability to render out
a preview animation using the viewport renderer or nitrous.
So it can store the viewport rendering on disc.
And that provides the ability to evaluate animation
that cannot be played back in real time in the viewports.
All right, I'll close that dialogue.
That's how to set up frame rate and playback options.
In the following movie, we'll look at setting up
the active time segment and the time display units,
also in the Time Configuration dialogue.