After doing a lot of animation in 3DS Max and rendering using Sequencer, I’ve found that the most daunting task I had to deal with was timing separate animations to all synch the way I wanted within the same Sequence.
It seemed natural that I would be able to animate the play rate of each track using keyframes but this is sadly missing entirely. We do have a playrate track, but it’s for the entire sequence. Can two separate sequences be played together on separate objects and rendered with one camera?
Let’s say I have an animation of an aircraft. I wish to duplicate it and have it timed so that one craft overtakes another at a certain point in the animation. For the first half, I want them side-by-side, perfectly in synch, but then I want one of them to accelerate and overtake the other and pull away from it.
I can do this in my authoring app no problem, but I can’t do it in Sequencer than I know of.
Or can I?
Is there anything in the newer versions to handle something like this? If not, how difficult is this to add?
I am fully aware that an animated playrate track would affect the overall length of an animation and would off-synch where the timeline shows vs where the animation actually presently is. I DO believe that this is a logistics issue which could result in some form of paradox…but I want something to handle it anyway. Perhaps the actual animation track in sequencer’s main timeline would actually stretch or squash based on the playrate keyframes.
I find something like this would be hugely helpful in many cases where only certain objects within a complete animation would slow down or speed up and have those changes be nice smoothly curved adjustments.
Thanks for any advice.