8

Controlling Time 281
Controlling Time
Youcreateanimationbychangingyoursceneover
time. You can exercise great control over time, as
follows:
• How ti me is measured and displayed.
• The length of the act ive time segment (the part
of the animation in which you’re currently
working).
• How much time is covered by each r ender ed
frame of your animation.
Other issues in t he topics which follow describe
how to move through time and how to view
animationintheviewports.
Choosing the Time Displa y Forma t
When you start 3ds Max, the default time display is
in frames, but you can use alternative time-display
formats.Forexample,youmightwanttoseetime
in seconds and minutes.
You can specify different time-display formats
using the
Time Configuration dialog (page 3–768)
> Time Display group settings. When you change
thetimedisplayformat,younotonlychangethe
way that time is shown in all parts of the software,
but you also change the method with which you
access time.
You c an use these time display formats:
Fr am e s —Displays time in whole frames.
This is the default display mode. The amount of
time covered by a single frame depends on your
choice for the current frame rate. For example,
in NTSC v ideo each frame represents 1/30th of a
second.
SMPTE—Displays time using the Society of Motion
Picture and Television Engineers format.
This is the standard time-display format for most
professional animation work. From left to right,
the SMPTE format displays minutes, seconds, and
frames, delineated by colons. For example, 2:16:14
represents 2 minutes, 16 seconds, and 14 frames.
FRA ME: TICK S—Displays time using frames and the
program’s internal time increment, c alled "ticks."
There are 4,800 ticks per second, so you can
actually access t ime intervals as small as 1/4800
of a second.
MM:SS:TICKS—Displays time in minutes (MM),
seconds (SS), and ticks, delineated by colons.