Animating Real- Time Game Characters-P9: My intent in writing Animating Real-Time Game Characters has been to share my work methods, thoughts, and ideas about animating real-time characters in 3ds max 4™ and character studio 3®. Any factor that affects the animation process using these two tools has been covered. | 230 Animating Real-Time Game Characters FIGURE Adding a Time Tag gives you a nice shortcut to an animation clip. Move your Time Slider to Frame 50. Click on the Add Time Tag box and a new option is there for you to click on 20 Idle. Click on it and the Time Slider automatically goes to the first frame of the idle Figure . 50 40 48 Add Tag 52 54 3 x Ed Tag 3 V. ft Time Tags will appear when clicking on the Add Time Tag message box. Since Widge will be used for a WildTangent export you will need to know the start and end time of the animation when you export the animations later. Bring up Time Configuration again and change your End Time to 60 instead of 59. Then go to the Time Tag menu and select Edit Tag Figure . FIGURE Edit Time Tags to change the name or delete a time tag. When the Edit Time Tag menu pops up select 20 Idle from the list and rename it in the Tag Name field to Idle Start. Hit OK and then go to Frame 60. Click on Add Time Tag again and create a new time tag called Idle End Figure . Chapter 6 Keyframe Animation Part 231 SUMMARY FIGURE Add the end of the idle motion to the Time Tag list. The benefit of using time tags should be obvious. They are definitely most useful when a character has a substantially large number of animations. With the animation complete save your max file skip ahead 20 frames and you re ready to move on to any other animations required. If _ you want or need to load from the Chapter6 directory on ON THE CD this book s CD-ROM Figure . FIGURE Load to see how the alien psycho s supposed to look. Before animating decide whether or not to use keyframes motion capture or a combination of the two. Whichever method you choose think 232 Animating Real-Time Game Characters of your 3ds max file as an animation folder that holds all your character s moves. Prior to setting any keyframes make sure you prepare your Biped for animation by assigning a transparent material
