Subtitles of the Movie

We'll take a look at Behaviors in this movie and we're going to look at two specifically: Bouncing and Spinning, because those are the most useful ones after you get done with Point At, and we kind of looked at the Point At behavior as we've been working with lights through this series. Let's go ahead and insert a primitive, and in this case let's do a cube. I'll just plunk it right in the middle of the scene, and let's come over to Modifiers, down to Behaviors, and add a Bounce Modifier. You'll notice as soon as I did that, our cube immediately sank into the floor, and the reason for that is that the Bounce Modifier, or Behavior here, pays attention to where the hot point is on the object. So, what it did, the floor hide is indicated as zero feet, is that it dropped the hot point to zero feet, not the object. Let's change that by pushing down the Caps Lock. I'm going to drag the hot point down using the Z-axis Control to the very bottom of the cube and when I release it watch what happens to the cube. It pops up to the base of the floor. Now with our Bounce Modifier, if we go ahead and drag the Timeline here, since this is an animation, let me turn off the Caps Lock Ð and one other thing, this scene is built at the medium size, which is 30 foot by 30 foot U.S., 10 meter by 10 meter in the metric system, and the Bounce Modifier or Behavior pays attention to the scene scale. Right now our Bounce is set to .08 feet and I'm going to increase this to something more like 5 feet and click OK. Our cube is now floating above the floor and now when I go ahead and drag the Timeline Indicator we'll see that our cube is bouncing happily along. Now, this is not a bounce behavior like physics, where if you dropped a ball and it would slowly, the bounce cycle would slowly decay away as the bounce keeps getting smaller and smaller. This is for continuous bouncing motion, like somebody dribbling a basketball. For those types of decay items you would need to go ahead and keyframe this Behavior and at the end of the animation sequence go ahead and turn the bounces per second to zero. The problem is, is that may not be always sitting on the floor when that terminates, so you'll need to do just a little bit of experimentation for that. The next Modifier I want to take a look at Ð let's just convert this Ð is Spin. And that's down to Behaviors, Spin. You'll notice immediately it set our cube on the floor and that's where it was when it dropped from the Bounce Modifier. I'm going to drag the cube up here. The Spin Modifier does rotate the spin about the hot point so if we wanted to change where this is we could drag the hot point out, but let's go ahead and just examine this. It's set to one cycle per second and I didn't have my Timeline marker all the way back at zero. Let me delete this keyframe by highlighting it and Deleting it, and what was keyframed was the actual motion of the cube going up in the scene. Now when we drag through our Timeline we can see that our cube is spinning happily along. Well, let's go ahead and highlight the cube, press the Caps Lock, and drag our hot point out a little bit further. I'll deselect the hot point now, and now we can see our cube spinning about the hot point. These are extremely useful features when you're working, especially with complex or types of mechanical motion that you need to work with in your scene. So, there are some quick ways to work with the Spin Modifiers. Again, its Behaviors can be keyframed. For more on keyframing, go ahead and check out the Animation Section of this series. We move on to our new Section, which is exploring the Modelers of Carrara.