Animation - Key Framing

In order to create the actual animation I needed to use 3DS Max's time line and key framing.

Because the project must be 30fps and last 30 seconds a good place to start was to make the time line 900 frames long, this meant that if I used up all 900 frames the animation would be exactly 30 seconds long.

In order to make a object move all that I needed to do was to select the object, create a keyframe, which makes the programme store the location, rotation and size of the object at the moment in the time line, and then progress the time line by the amount of frames that I wanted and move the object to a new location, rotation or size and create a new keyframe. Then, if I pressed play on the animation, the object would over the course of the time between the keyframes change to the new location, rotation or size.

I was then able to simplify this process even more using the 'Auto Key' button which made the programme automatically create a new keyframe when the selected object had changed any of its information in a new frame, meaning that I didn't have to press the keyframe button everytime I had changed something. This of course has its drawbacks in that sometimes when moving an object that you didn't want to keyframe and you had forgotten to untick the auto keyframe it would create one anyway.

The red bars are keyframes and the red at the top is showing auto key is active.