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Lecture 7 Advanced Animation: Using Trackview

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Another way to open Track View is to right click on an object and choose Track View Selected. This will open Track View with your selected objects track already open.

Open your project ball01

• From the Menu Bar, Choose Graph editors>Track View>Open Track View

• This will open the Track View:

• The Track View contains a hierarchy of everything in your project that is animateable.

• To find the track for the animation of our sphere, you need to open up some sub-menus in the hierarchy. This works just like Windows Explorer.

• Open up Objects>Sphere01>Transform and select Position

• You can now see the 3 key frames that we have been editing in the timeline displayed in the Track View. They should be in the track alongside Position

• If you cant see all of your key frames, you can adjust the view with the View Controllers in the bottom right hand corner of the Track View. These are:

   Zoom and Zoom Selected (same as standard View Port Controllers)

        Pan (same as standard View Port Controllers)

         Zoom Horizontal Extents 

         Zoom Value (vertical) Extents

• Use these to make sure you can see all 3 of your keyframes.

• If you right click on any of your key frames it will bring up the Key Info Box.

• At the moment we are at the Key Frame level: This means the animation info is displayed as key frames. We can also display the information as:

	Ranges	A range extends from the first to the last key frame of any animated track. Ranges can be moved and scaled.
	Time	Allows us to scale, reverse and insert segments of time.
	Position Ranges	Allows you to position keys and ranges at the same time.
	Function Curves	Allows us to see the Function Curves, as defined by the Tangent Types.

• The one we are most interested in is Function Curves.

• With you Position Track still selected, click on Function Curves.

• You should see something like this:

• The vertical direction measures value

• The horizontal direction measures time.

• The values are Absolute, i.e. relative to the World Co-ordinate system. (Remember that in the World Co-ordinate System, Z is the vertical axis, and Y is the Depth axis). 

• The colours of the curves show which axis they represent (refer to the World Co-ordinate system displayed in the bottom left of any of the View Ports).

• We can edit these curves as they are, but we will find it difficult, because any changes we make to one curve will also affect the other. In order to be able to adjust each axis' curve separately, we need to apply a Position XYZ Controller.