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In the previous video, we looked at how you could change the playback speed of a segment.
This is known as time warping or speed changing.
In this video, we will focus on animation as well as the animation editors in Autodesk Smoke.
To follow along with these lessons,
you can download the footage by clicking the link displayed in the YouTube description.
Or if you are using the podcast version of this video,
you can type the displayed link in your internet browser to download the relevant files.
The first thing you need to know about animation, is that you create animation in two modes.
The first mode is using auto key that automatically animates the affected values as you work.
As long as Auto-Key is on, keyframes are being placed in the sliders you adjust.
The second mode is working with auto key set to off.
This is where you have to manually set keyframes to animate a value.
Simply set your value and hold the K keyboard shortcut and click on the value.
This sets a keyframe on this animation channel using that value on this specific frame.
You can also right-click on the slider box to access a wealth of keyframe and animation commands.
So I’ll reset this channel to its default value.
You can also hold down OPTION+COMMAND+CLICK to reset this channel completely.
When it comes to adjusting values, dragging the slider to the left or to the right can do this.
Using OPTION+Q and dragging the slider, causes the values to adjust very slowly.
This is great for fine adjustments.
And holding down OPTION+W and dragging the sider,
adjusts the value very fast for larger animation values.
Or just the regular click and drag will give you a medium value adjustment.
And finally for precise adjustments, you click the slider to set a value in the calculator.
You can try this out with our animation example.
We’ll use auto-key to a creating a basic animation.
On the first frame, I'll position the graphic to the left
and on the last frame I'll position the graphic to the right.
Scrubbing the time-bar, you can see that this has automatically created animation
between the two keyframes.
One very important point to note is once there is animation in a channel
and you are not using auto-key, any adjustments will be ignored unless you do one of two things.
Either turn auto-key back on and then make your adjustment.
Or make your adjustment and remember to hold K and click on the slider
to add a new keyframe or adjust an existing one.
You can choose whether to keep Auto-Key on or off when working with animation channels.
If you wanted to reset a channel without going into an animation editor,
you can right-click on the slider and choose the reset option from the pop up menu.
Here you have two options.
You can reset to the original default value.
Or you can reset the animation channel to the current value of the slider at this frame
with no additional animation in the channel.
Just focusing on the sliders for the moment, there are a number of indicators
telling you what is state the parameter at the current frame.
A simple number in the slider tells you the channel is set at its default state.
An asterisk in the slider tells you that the value has been changed from its original value.
With regards to animation, a yellow line under the value
tells you that there is a key-frame at this frame.
The blue line under the value indicates that this slider is an animated channel
but you are not on a key-frame at this frame.
This means you do not always have to go searching through animation channel editors,
when looking to find a channel that has animated key-frames.
Holding SHIFT and clicking on a slider selects it,
and shows the particular animation key-frames in the time bar.
This allows you to navigate to those key-frames with the navigation controls.
The shortcuts are assigned to OPTION+K and SHIFT+K on your keyboard.
So the time-bar will only show the selected channels keyframes.
Either SHIFT+CLICK a slider to select it or hold COMMAND+CLICK on a slider to add it to the selection.
All the selected channel keyframes will now be shown in the time-bar.
In the next video, we will look at the animation curves in the Animation Editor.