2008

Right: The bottle is smoothed using three different smoothing groups: on the body,
the neck, and the top edge.
Smoothing groups define whether a surface is rendered with sharp edges or
smooth surfaces.
Smoothing groups are numbers assigned to the 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
smoothing group, they will render as a smooth surface. If they don't share the
same smoothing group, the edge between them will render as a corner.
You can manually change or animate the threshold values for smoothing
group assignments using such tools as
Editable Poly (Polygon/Element) on
page 2091 and the
Edit Mesh modifier on page 1283 .
SMPTE
SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) 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.
As you move through time in a SMPTE display, when the seconds field
increments, the frames field recycles to 0 and starts over. For example, given
an NTSC frame rate of 30 frames per second, as you move through time, the
frames field counts from 0 to 29, at which point the seconds field increments
by 1, and the frames field begins again at 0.
As with the Frames display format, the SMPTE format lets the time slider move
at single-frame increments.
Space Warp Behavior
In
crowd animation on page 4680 , the Space Warp behavior lets you assign a
space warp, such as Wind or Gravity, to one or more delegates. The Space
Warp behavior can use any space warp in the Forces category. These space
warps treat
delegates on page 7755 as if they were particles.
Glossary | 7933