Working with Animation

MAXScript / pymxs expose several functions for working with animations in 3ds Max.

Getting and Setting the Frame Range

The animation range is held in the animationRange global, which holds an Interval value. Intervals represent a range of time. So for example to get the frame range and change it:

>>> pymxs.runtime.animationRange
<Interval<(interval 0f 100f)>>
>>> pymxs.runtime.animationRange = pymxs.runtime.interval(0,200)

Setting Animation Keys

Animation keys can be set using the pymxs version of the MAXScript at time context expression, pymxs.attime(). Note that pymxs.animate() must be set to True first.

rt = pymxs.runtime

t = rt.teapot()

with pymxs.animate(True):
    with pymxs.attime(0):
        t.pos = rt.point3(0,0,0)
    with pymxs.attime(100):
        t.pos = rt.point3(0,10,100)

Playing Back the Animation

pymxs provide two functions for controlling animation: playAnimation() and stopAnimation(). You can query whether animation is playing with isAnimPlaying(). For example:

>>> pymxs.runtime.playAnimation(immediateReturn=True)
>>> pymxs.runtime.isAnimPlaying()
True
>>> pymxs.runtime.stopAnimation()
True

To set the playback speed, use the timeConfiguration.playbackSpeed setting. For example, to set the playback speed to 2x:

pymxs.runtime.timeConfiguration.playbackSpeed = 4

All of the settings on the Time Configuration dialog are exposed to pymxs/MAXScript. See the "Time Configuration Dialog" topic in the MAXScript Help for more information.