Animating lights in max

Rick Stirling

This afternoon I spent a while working on a lighting previewer. Then max spoiled it


Im in max 8

I want to have a day cycle animation, where an ambient light turns from day to night and back over a few hundred frames. The ambient omni in the scene will change colour and strength, then I'll have a sun and maybe a moon on an arc to strengthen the colours, light strength and add direction.

moving lights are easy, but I'm having "fun" with the animation of the colours and strength. Sometimes they change, sometimes they don't. sometimes they blend, sometimes they jump. The animation blend on the status bar is set to smooth.

At the moment I'm ignoring the direction light and working purely on the ambient

So from 6 am to 12 noon I get a nice smooth animated hue change from grey blue through a pink orange to strong bright daylight. Then it sticks at white for a few frames and jumps to pitch black. the midnight was set to dark dark dark blue at 0.1 strength, but the aniamtion values is like -4.9 or something.

Any ideas?

MoP

When you say "animation blend on the status bar is set to smooth", what are you referring to?

Have you checked the curves in Track View?

Rick Stirling

Yup, in track view some are curved and some are stepped.

THe blend mode is at the immediate right to the timescrubber, its a dropdown/up list of aniamtion curves like smooth and stepped and fastin.

Soemties I think that its the order I'm animating - 6am to noon works fine, then noon to midnight works, then I go and add the 6p lighting and everythign is fucked.

I'm just used the max autokey settings.

FatAssasin

That blend mode flyout is only to set the default curve type of new keys, it doesn't change existing keys. In the track view, select all the keys and change them to the smart curve type, or whatever its called. The bezier handles should flatten out at the top and bottom most keys and not let the curves shoot past them. After you manually change the curves in the track view, set this type as the defualt and just leave it there.

Rick Stirling

Hmm - I had set all the keys to be that type, restarted max, checked the curve settings and then started the entire project again and was getting the same issues.

Eric Chadwick

What are your default tangents?
Customize > Prefs > Animation > Set Defaults

I find the list in there a bit misleading, as there are really only two to set... Bezier and TCB.