Animation tuts

[FZnoob]

I find myself needing to make a few simple animations. Are there any basic tuts on this? I saw the tips 90 & 76

[Tech]

Hi FZnoob,

 

Yes, in the Animation Manual there is a whole section of Tutorials at the end.  

 

Are you wanting to animate objects, or views (or both)?

[FZnoob]

Thanks. Will be doing both.

[Tech]

Ok.  For Animating Cameras, please see the following additional information:

 

Here is a quick summary of 3 different methods that you can use to generate animations in formZ:

 

Option 1: Animating from keyframes:

 

Save all of the desired (keyframe) views in your Views Palette, and select them in the desired order (using the checkmark to the right of the view name in the palette, or by graphically selecting them in the screen). Get the Animate Entities tool and click in the screen, and select the desired options. Click OK, and a new view will be added to the bottom of your View Palette. Make this view Active, and then you can scrub your timeline or click the Play button see the view animate.

 

(To affect the velocity, you can either space your keyframes appropriately, or after the animation is generated, you can move the keyframes from within the Animation Timeline to adjust this as you would like.)

 

Option 2: Keyframing a camera (view):

 

Save a view in the Views Palette and make it visible so you can see the camera. Click on the camera with the Keyframe Tool. Move the timeline, and then move the camera. Move the timeline again and move the camera again if desired. Scrub the timeline, or click Play to see the view animate.

 

Option 3: Animating along a path:

 

Draw a 2d (open or closed) polyline or curve to serve as your animation path. Get the Animate Along a Path tool, choose the desired options, click on a View, and then click on the path. (When selecting these options, you may wish to select Tangent: +Z, Up Axis: +Y.)

 

NOTE that if you want to create an animation of the camera going around your objects (similar to the Turntable feature), you can do this very easily by creating the desired starting view that is centered on your objects. Then go to a Top view and draw a circle whose center is at the Center of Interest, and whose circumference is on the Eye Point of the camera. Go to a Side View, and Move the circle straight up so that its height is equal to that of the Eye Point. Then simply animate the Eye Point of the camera along this path.

 

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Note also that for both Options 2 and 3, you can Keyframe the entire camera, just the Eyepoint, just the Center of Interest, or both independently if you like.

 

Once you have previewed your animation and have everything as you would like, you can select Generate Animation from the Display Menu to save this as an animation file. We generally recommend saving this as a FAN file with compression set to Off, or Deflate. Once this is generated, you can use the File Menu: View File command to play back the animation. You can then use the File Menu: Export Animation to export the FAN file to a Quicktime Movie file (MOV), to a wide variety of image file formats, or if you are on Windows, you can also export this to an AVI file. Note that with MOV or AVI, you can select from different CODEC options, which will affect the quality and size of the resulting animation.

 

You can also right click on any tool in formZ and choose Manual to open the documentation to the appropriate page. 

 

In addition, there are many animation videos that you can find here:

 

<http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEF4E89FBDF4318F1&feature=plcp>

 

These videos are for formZ 6, but this applies 99% to the current versions of formZ.

 

Does that help?

[FZnoob]

Yes. Thanks. I have done animations in C4D, so I don't think I will have much trouble.