Across the top of the interface are tabbed menus, each containing key tools for object editing,
animating different items, compositing, and more. Before you learn about the different
menus, take a look at the bottom of the Layout interface.Here, you??™ll find your timeline.
The Timeline
Animation is all about timing. It??™s about telling items such as lights, cameras, objects, or
even textures to occupy a specific point in space at a specific time. Figure 2.2 shows the
LightWave Layout timeline.
Figure 2.2 The LightWave v9 Layout timeline.
By default, Layout works in frames rather than seconds or minutes. This is because 3D animation,
and even 2D animation, is a frame-by-frame process. Although the computer
automatically interpolates motions, it??™s still up to you to create the ???key??? frames. A
keyframe is nothing more than a marker in time. At the left side of the timeline, the value
is 0, representing the first frame of the animation.
Note
At the right side of the timeline is the ending frame number,which defaults to 60. Because
LightWave defaults to the National Television System Committee (NTSC) video standard,
60 frames is 2 seconds, at a 30 frames per second rate.
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