Animating The Wheel

When first animating the wheel, the first thought was that it would be quite a straightforward and simple task. However it soon appeared to be a little more tricky than first anticipated. The first attempt at animating the wheel was done via auto key frames on the time line. With a keyframe at the start frame and then moving to a later frame and rotating the wheel object 360 degrees and applying another keyframe makes the wheel rotate all the way around over the span of those frames. Although at first this seemed to be OK, when applying this animation method within the full 600-700 frame movie the wheel tended to need more keyframes to support its animation at a consistent speed. The wheel would also gradually speed up and slow down as it approached the keyframes which ruined the consistent animation.


Upon further research and advice given by lecturer we also looked at applying an animation technique called 'Euler XYZ' which in effect allows the user to select an object such as the wheel, and control the amount of frames, speed, direction and rotation. However this method seemed to be quite complicated and the 3ds Max help files not really explaining how to make it do simple functions. This unfortunately led myself and other members of the group to experiment with the Euler technique, without actually ever getting an object to move. As time was pressing on until the final presentation and hand in date we decided to use another technique using the curve editor. Searching the internet and 3ds Max help files gave me the impression that the curve editor was worth a shot because it seemed to be the most popular method of controlling the sort of animation we needed.
At first it seemed quite complicated, but with some experimenting and a bit of guess work we started getting some results. At first we used keyframes again, over a 100 frame span, making the wheel rotate 360 degrees. However to make the wheel keep its consistent spin and to make it last till the 600th frame the curve editor was needed. Within the curve editor the wheels rotation animation appeared a green line going from left to right at a gentle incline. With help from the lecturer we were able to figure out how to make the animation loop so the keyframes could be kept at the ideal spinning frequency (frames 1 to 80) then using the loop option inside the parameter curve-out-of-range types, to repeat it without extra keyframes being added to the scene.
This was a bit of a breakthrough for the group as we could now tweak the actual speed of the wheel as it rotated from frame 1 to 600. The wheel still appeared to be moving quite slowly, so to speed it up I pulled the green line from within the curve editor and made the incline much greater. The gentler the incline the slower the animation.


The wheel animating without textures using the curve editor.