Subtitles of the Movie

In exploring some of the oddities of working with Metaball Modeler we're going to take a look at how to animate inside of the Metaball Modeler because it plays by different rules, as I mentioned before. This is not the Animation Section, so I'm not going to explain everything that's going on as we animate; just know that after you go through Animation and want to come back some of this may make a little more sense. If you're already familiar with the Animation Controls in Carrara this will make perfect sense. Let's go ahead and make a 4-second animation. I'm going to move this and at the end of four seconds I want this blob to come through and come toward the camera. We'll start here at our Timeline, and I'm simply going to move the Time Marker to the end at 4 seconds and then drag this through. We can see that we've got Master Objects and a Metaball Object and even though I have moved this and it set new keyframes, when I select this Tweener in the middle to control how the motion behaves I don't get any controls for that, so the base coarse animation is done inside the Metaball Modeler. To go ahead and finesse this animation you need to come back into the Assembly Room and deal with the Tweeners there where you get your actual controls. So, for example, selecting the Tweener I can go ahead at this point do an Ease In Ease Out function so we have a gentle beginning and a gentle finish to the motion. Taking us all the way back I can go ahead and change my frames now to something a little more like 12 frames per second and select Play, and we'll see the object come through and morph that way and then slow down again. So, the basic animation, again, done in the Metaball Room, the finessing, the Tweener animation, has to be done in the Assembly Room, the last thing to note is that you can't actually have two different Metaball Objects interact and morph around. They have to all be in a single instance of a Metaball Modeler, and what I mean by that is that if I duplicated this Ð let's come to the beginning of our Timeline here Ð if I duplicated this Metaball Object and relocated the Metaball Object I'm going to get a duplication of the behavior, or the animation, that this large ball, when it intersects this other little blob from the original Metaball Object, is not going to morph into it. It's going to go through it as a solid object. We can go ahead and click that, and you can see it just doesn't behave. They don't interact that way. The only time Metaballs interact enmass is when they're used in something like a Particle Generator which we'll deal with when we get in those sections. So, that's the introduction to the weird and wonderful world of the Carrara Metaball Modeler.