- [Instructor] The dope sheet
makes it easy to edit keyframes in the time dimension,
but it doesn't allow us to visualize the transitions
between keyframes.
The dope sheet does give us access to numerical values
for individual keys through a right click dialogue.
But to really truly see what an animation track is doing,
we need the curve editor.
I'll select the animated object, the camera,
and we can open the curve editor
from the Graph Editor's menu,
Graph Editors track view curve editor,
but I prefer to use the button on the main toolbar
that's found over here, curve editor.
By default, the curve editor automatically expands
and selects the animated tracks of the selected object.
The position and rotation tracks
are highlighted in blue here,
indicating that they're selected.
The main panel of the curve editor is a graph
that displays function curves for the selected tracks.
The horizontal dimension is time
and the vertical dimension is the value of the track.
In this case, the values for position and rotation.
To frame all the curves within the graph,
there's a really important button down here
in the lower right navigation toolbar.
It looks like two sets of brackets.
Frame horizontal and value extents.
Click on that and now we can actually see
all the function curves for the selected tracks.
To navigate in the graph,
use the standard max hot keys,
control+alt and middle mouse to zoom.
If we control+alt middle mouse drag left to right,
we'll zoom in the time dimension.
Control+alt middle mouse drag up and down
to zoom in the value dimension or both at the same time.
We can actually move the mouse freely left and right
and up and down to zoom in both dimensions.
Panning, likewise is done with the middle mouse button.
We can move the entire graph around left to right
or up and down.
Just as in the dope sheet,
we can change the current time
by dragging on this double yellow vertical bar.
Keyframes are indicated by these small boxes.
The values between keyframes are displayed here
as function curves
and these are interpolated values in between keys.
So all this data is filled in
based upon the values of the keys
and their interpolation settings.
We'll talk more about interpolation in the next movie.
Just like the dope sheet,
the curve editor has fake tracks
such as the name of the object, transform,
position, rotation and so on.
A real track, such as X position, can hold keyframes.
A fake track cannot.
And we see the transform track
is actually completely blank in the graph.
If we select that, there's nothing there.
Most of those fake tracks, such as the transform track,
do not hold or generate any information
but the position and rotation tracks however, are special.
Each one of these position and rotation
is assigned something called a controller
which is a program module to generate data
such as animation keyframes.
The X, Y, and Z axis within this controller
actually store the keyframe data.
And so when we select an individual axis, like X position,
we have actual keyframes,
but if we select the top level position track,
we don't see any keyframes.
Those position and rotation controller tracks
will display the final output of their individual channels
but we cannot edit the data here at this level.
The curves are displayed as dashed lines
and we don't see any keys.
To edit the keys, we need to go to the individual axis
within that controller.
The first thing I always do is declutter the graph
by deleting any static tracks or channels.
Those are tracks that have one or more keyframes
but the value is constant over time.
Static channels have perfectly flat function curves.
Let's select all the position tracks.
Hold down the control key and select all of those.
We see that this blue Z position track is perfectly flat.
That's a static track.
It's not serving any purpose.
It's not creating animation
and it's just cluttering up the graph.
Well, why does it exist?
Because when we create keyframes in auto key
or set key mode, 3DS Max always keys all three axis
of that transform controller,
even if the value has not changed
or is not relevant to the animation.
3DS Max doesn't know what's important to us
so it just keyframes all three channels.
By the way, we can override that behavior by locking tracks
but we don't have time to cover every feature
of the curve editor here.
If you want to learn more about that,
you can check out my weekly series,
3DS Max: Tips, Tricks and Techniques.
Let's delete the static tracks
to remove the irrelevant and excess data.
Just drag a selection rectangle
to select all of those keyframe boxes
on that blue Z position graph
and press the delete key on the keyboard.
Notice that once we delete those keyframes,
that track data is displayed as a dashed line.
That indicates that there is no keyframe data
in that region of time.
And likewise with the animated tracks,
we see that before frame zero and after frame 149,
we have dashed lines there too
indicating there's no keyframe data there,
before frame zero and after frame 149.
Now let's check in on the rotation tracks.
Select each one of those holding down the control key.
And we may need to reframe our display.
Click on frame horizontal and value extents.
We see that the red Z rotation
and the green X rotation are static channels,
so we can delete that data.
Let's hide the Z rotation track.
Control, click on that
and then draw a selection rectangle around
all the keys in the graph
and once again, press the delete key.
And now those have been deleted.
All right, now we've cleaned this up
so that if, for example, we select all the X, Y, Z position
and X, Y, Z rotation tracks and reframe our graph,
we can easily tell
that these are the only tracks that we care about.
We see that these dashed ones don't have keyframes
so we can't actually even edit them.
All right, so if I wanted to hide those, of course,
I could just select the tracks that were relevant
which would be X position, Y position and Z rotation.
All right, that's the basics of the curve editor.
In the next movie,
we'll explore editing the interpolated values
between the keys.