Working with the Walkthrough Assistant

Instead of manually manipulating the camera, you can make animating much easier by using the Walkthrough Assistant. The Walkthrough Assistant allows you to “fly” your camera to explore your virtual designs. Although the tool's name implies interior usage, the Walkthrough Assistant is actually suitable for both interior and exterior scenes.

In essence, it simplifies the tasks of creating a camera, constraining that camera to a path of your choice, and then makes it easy to edit and animate various aspects of the camera such as tilt, pan and lens values. All manipulation is centralized in the same dialog so you do not have to browse through various panels to make changes to camera parameters.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to:

Create a target camera
Adjust camera head tilt and angle
Use Set Key to animate a camera
Render an animation to a sequence of still image files
Create a movie file of your animation

Skill level: Beginner

Time to complete: 1+ hours (includes rendering time to create an animation.)

Preparation for This Tutorial

If you have not already downloaded the tutorial files (MAX scenes and other assets), download them now and unzip them into a project folder called \Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2012 tutorials. See Where to Find Tutorial Files.
On the Quick Access toolbar, click (Project Folder), and set your current project to Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2012 Tutorials.

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