Glossary
Animation, like movies and television, is based on a principle called "persistence of vision." If you view a series of related still images in quick succession, your brain perceives them as continuous motion. gmax refers to each image as a frame.
Historically, the major difficulty in creating animations has been that the animator must produce a large number of frames. Depending on the quality you want, one minute of animation might require between 720 and 1800 separate still images. Creating images by hand is a big job. That's where keyframing comes in.
Most of the frames in an animation are routine, incremental changes from the previous frame directed toward some predefined goal. Early animation studios quickly realized they could increase the productivity of their master artists by having them draw only the important frames, called keyframes. Assistants could then figure out the frames that were required in between the keyframes. These frames were (and still are) called tweens.
Use gmax as your animation assistant. As the master animator, you create the keyframes that record the beginning and end of each transformation. The values at these keyframes are called keys. The software calculates the interpolated values between each key value, resulting in tweened animation.
gmax is not limited to animating transformations (such as position, rotation, and scale). It can animate just about any parameter you can access. Thus, you can animate modifier parameters, such as a Bend or a Taper angle, material parameters, such as the color or transparency of an object, and much more.