in practice Sliders made easy.

[MrTom]

Quick tutorial on how to use Sliders.....the easy way!

What are Sliders? They are 'Helper' objects that allow you to control a vast amount of object properties by 'sliding' the control from within the viewport without having to select the property each time you want to adjust something. They are also known as 'Manipulators', for obvious reasons...they can manipulate properties of objects...and can be found in the 'Manipulators' section of the 'Helper' drop-down list.

You can assign a 'Slider' to any number of properties, and can be animated too, making animation very quick and very accurate. You can also 'type-in' a value for the 'Slider' if you need to be ultra-accurate, or just slide it.....so very versatile.

The advantage of 'Sliders'? Well because the 'Limits' of the 'slider' are pre-defined, by you, it's easy to safe-guard 'overshooting'....ie, you cannot adjust something beyond it's limits.....handy if you have something rotating which needs to stop to avoid intersecting another object. Apart from that, having the control, (of whatever), directly in the viewport is a big timesaver.

So....how to?

Lets start with a simple object we want to 'Manipulate'....in this case I want to Rotate the object and assign a 'Slider' to do this.

The object I want to manipulate:




I want to Rotate this object about one end so I need to move the 'Pivot Point' to an end....In this case the 'Left'.

Move the 'Pivot Point':




Now that the object is set-up for correct rotation I can now introduce the 'Slider' to the viewport. 'Sliders' can be found under Helpers>Manipulators>Slider.

The 'Slider' helper object:




To place the slider just click in the viewport. It is NOT placed in 'world space' but rather 'Sticks' to the viewport.......it will display in whichever viewport is active.

Placing the 'Slider':




The 'Slider', once in the viewport, can be moved and lengthened as required.....this is explained later.

Now I have my 'Slider' and my object I can now assign the 'Slider' to the Object and define what it will control. I can do this by using the 'Reaction Manager'....found under Animation>Reaction Manager.

Reaction Manager:




Once selected the 'Reaction Manager' window will open. Looks just as daunting as any other window but is actually quite simple to use....which hopefully I'll demonstrate here.

First thing to do is define the 'Controller' for our object.....in this case it is the 'Slider'. We add this to the Manager by clicking on the large black '+' in the top left of the window.

Add Master:




We then select the 'Slider' by clicking it in the viewport, or 'Picking' it from the object list.
When we do a list of options appears. I want the 'Slider' to control a 'Value' so this is choosen from the list.

Slider options:




Once choosen the 'Slider' appears in the Manager window as the 'Master' (Although this is not shown).

Slider as 'Master':




I now need to assign the object to the 'Slider'. The object is basically a 'Slave' of the controller (Slider), and can be asigned in two ways......

1. Select the Object (Box01)...and click 'Add Selected' in the Manager....



OR.....

2. Click 'Add Slave' and then select the object (Box01).




It makes no difference which way you do this but when you do another list pops up to allow us to define WHAT property of the object will be controlled.
In this case I want to control 'Rotation' in the 'Y' axis.......

Define the property:




The 'Slave' (Box01) will then be displayed in the Manager.

The Object as 'Slave':




You will now notice that a 'State' appears in the lower half of the Manager window......this 'State' is the position (because thats what I want to control), of the object AND the Slider.......or in other words, what 'State' is the object in when the 'Slider' is in it's current 'State'.

Looking at the values you can see that the 'Slider' is set to 0 (Zero %), and the 'Object' Rotation is also 0 (Zero °).....this is the first 'State'.

To allow for motion we now need to set-up a second 'State' for when the 'Slider' is @100% and the Object is something other than 0°....in this case it will be 90°.

So to create the second 'State' we click the 'Create Mode' button in the Manager.

Create State:




We now MOVE the controller to 100%. To do this we need to 'Activate' our 'Slider' first, remember the 'Slider' is not an object in the scene but on the viewport so.....click the 'Manipulators' icon on the toolbar.

Manipulators Icon:




The 'Slider' is now active and can be moved with the cursor.
The small triangle under the slider is the controller....it will turn red when the cursor is hovered over it. This should now be slid to the right or @100%.

Slider controls:




While we are here the Slider itself can be changed to suit your needs. The '+' sign will 'Hide' the slider....the small 'square' will allow you to drag the slider into a new position on the viewport and the 'diamond' will lengthen the slider for greater accuracy....note the range will still be 0% to 100%....just the physical 'length' of the slider is altered. You can also add a 'Lable' to the slider to identify what it does...this is done from the command panel.

Next we need to change the 'Rotation' of the object to its position when the slider is @100%.......we need to turn off the 'Manipulators' icon first to be able to 'Rotate' any objects within the scene.

With the 'Manipulators' icon off we can now 'Rotate' the object to it's second position....in this case I'm just rotating it in the 'Y' axis by -90°.

Rotate the object to new position:




The 'Slider' and 'Object' should now look something like this:




Once the position of the 'Slider' and the position of the 'Object' are set in their second 'State' we can add this to the list of 'States' by clicking the Arrow next to the 'Create Mode' button....this adds 'State02' to the list.

Add second 'State':





You should now see that the Manager updates to display the second 'State' for both the 'Slider' and the 'Object'. looking at the values we can see that the 'Slider' is now 100% and the Object is now rotated (in 'Y') to -90°.

Second 'State':




That's all for assigning sliders to objects. We can now turn off the 'Create Mode' button and close the Manager.

Turn off 'Create Mode' and close Manager:




If we now turn back on the 'Manipulator' icon (to switch control to the slider) and move the triangle in the slider the object should rotate about it's 'Y' axis from 0° to -90°.

The 'Slider' in action:


Now wasn't that easy?

You can of course add any number of sliders to the viewport and just add them to the Manager as before. You could easily have one slider for each axis of rotation or whatever.

Experiment with it, it's a good way to learn.

Regards.

[Stephael]

Wow this is a nice feature I would probably have never found without your tut.
But now I'm missing an idea on how to really use it to enhance my work, perhaps for animating rigged hands...
I put my slider outside of my view port but now I can't get it back

Thanks for this tutorial and I'm really looking forward to your next one it will probably cover another cool feature I never recognized.

[MrTom]

Originally Posted by Stephael

I put my slider outside of my view port but now I can't get it back

Ah.......use the 'X position' and 'Y position' in the command panel. If the slider is not selected then use the Object list to select it first.....I think the keyboard shortcut is 'H'...depending on which version of Max you use.

If you put X=0.5 and Y=0.5 it should return to the center of the viewport......(0 being the extreme left/down and 1 being the extreme right/up), you can also type-in the length of the slider too......if it's gone type in 100 for 'Width'.

You may have to play with these numbers but these generally work.

You could also just delete the slider and create a new one.

Sliders are very useful for animation.....especially character animation...facial movements are a breeze using 'Sliders'....you can assign one for the mouth open/shut.....eyebrows up/down......frowning....eyes left/right, up/down.......etc. It just means you can concentrate on moving the object rather than having to select different elements all the time.

Another example would be for lights in a scene.....imagine animating an 'angle-poise' lamp........difficult at the best of times, but using sliders you set your limits of each movement and just have one slider for each part that moves. As you can type-in the absolute position of each movement you can be extremely accurate. Not only that but you can always get back to your initial 'State' by setting all the sliders to 0.

Use your imagination.........

Regards.

[Riyan]

Wow,,,
Thanks,,,
it's easy to follow you're the best!!!