3ds Max Animation Using Buffer Curves

Concluding our coverage of the new Curve Editor tools, let’s take a look at buffer curves. These are temporary curves that you can use for analysis and comparison purposes. Open up the Curve Editor. I’ll maximize that, and reveal our track. Under sphere we’ve got the Z position bezier float. Just click to make sure nothing is selected, and then click to frame horizontal and value extents. We can see the entire curve. Buffer curves are found in their own toolbar down here at the bottom. Click on the leftmost icon to activate them. We also want to make sure that the next icon, show/hide buffer curves is also lit up. That way we can see the buffer curves as we’re working. Now, make some change to the curve. For example, select these key frames here, and change their values. Hold down control, and click and drag up and down, and release the mouse, and you can see right away that we have a dashed line representing the original curve. That’s the buffer curve. We’ve got some tools down here. First of all, swap curves with buffer. Click that button to reverse the change that we just made. We could use this tool to play back different versions of the animation. I’ll click it again and swap them once again