9

Sliding Footstep 1013
See also
Sunlight (page 3–1018)
Sunlight and Daylight Systems (page 1–418)
Sliding Footstep
In footstep animation (page 3–943),changing
biped foot key parameters enables the biped feet
to move or slide during a footstep period. This
feature is also available for motion-capture file
import to allow the biped feet to slide or pivot. In
the viewports, a sliding footstep is displayed as a
footstep with a line through the middle.
Smoothing Groups
Left: The bottle has no smoothing.
Middle: Smoothing is assigned only to the highlighted group
of faces.
Right: The bottle is smoothed using thre e different smoothing
groups: on the body, the neck, and the top edge.
Smoothinggroupsdefinewhetherasurfaceis
rendered with sharp edges or smo oth surfaces.
Smoothinggroupsarenumbersassignedtothe
faces or patches of an object. Each face or patch
can carry any number of smoothing groups up to
the maximum of 32. If two faces or patches share
an edge and share the same s moothing group, they
w i ll render as a smooth surface. If t hey don’t share
the s ame smoothing group, the edge between them
will render as a corner.
You can manually change or animate the threshold
values for smoothing g roup assignments us ing
such tools as Editable Po l y (Polygon/Element) (page
1–1048) and the Edit Mesh modifier (page 1 –634).
SMPTE
SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television
Engineers)isthestandardtimedisplayformatfor
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.
As you move through time in a SMPTE displa y,
when the seconds field increments, the frames field
recycles to 0 and starts over. For exa mple, given an
NTSCframerateof30framespersecond,asyou
move through time, the f rames field counts from 0
to 29, at which point the seconds field increments
by 1, and the f r ames field begins again at 0.
As with the Frames displa y format, the SMPTE
formatletsthetimeslidermoveatsingle-frame
increments.
Space Warp B ehavior
In crowd animation (page 2–1154), the Space Warp
behavior lets you assign a space war p, such as
W ind or Gravity, to one or more delegates. The
Space War p behavior can use any space war p
in the Forces category. These space warps treat
delegates (page 3–928) as if they were particles.
You can also use the Space Warp behavior to bind
delega tes to the Vec tor Fiel d s p a ce w ar p ( p age
2–1241) provided with character studio.This