Walkthrough

[cobrien]

Hello,

Can anyone point me in the right direction to find info on making animated walkthroughs in v9? I guess im after a step by step sort of thing, I'm not having much luck with the manual.

 

Thanks.

[johnalexander1571]

I don't know if there is a tutorial somewhere, but I know of two ways of doing this. I don't know if you can animate the walkthrough tool itself. I have tried walkthroughs in many apps and it is always a hair pulling deal, because good results that match what everyday real cameras do is quite an issue.

Approach one, use the Animate Entities tool. The idea here is that you set up cameras in your scene in order that are aimed at the things you want them to be and at the points in space, then select all the copied cameras in order, click to activate the tool, select you options, and boom, it makes a new animated view at the bottom of the views pallet. Activate the view and click play in the animation timeline.

Two, draw a path and then Use the Animate Along Path tool. This one is harder because of the camera alignment is one where you have to do trial and error to figure it out. Then you will see the camera not doing what you hoped. You can move the points, but I have found this to be so hard I always give up.

The up side of the path method is that you can then adjust the speed that the camera goes along the path in the animation editor. I don't think this is possible with the animate entities version.

One thing Paul Helm advised me to do, and this advice is golden, don't try to do one big long continuous shot if you can help it. It's better to create and animate a series of shorts that are better designed and then edited together the end. Plus, if you have animation problems, you don't always have to throw away every frame you've made.

I have also had some luck with rendering large stills and animating a zoom in if you don't need parallax. It can give a presentation a bit of a different tone and fill up some time if particular details are focused on. I like to focus on stuff the client asked for specifically at the beginning.

 

[johnalexander1571]

The animation manual has some good info on the Animate Entities tool if you get into it.

[cobrien]

Thanks John.

I didn't realise there was an Animation Manual, I couldn't find it on the formz website but have now found the link within FZ!

[johnalexander1571]

Here is a link to a formZ animation that I finished not long ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLfNdxWPUdI

I have noticed that the animation editors in formZ and Maya are quite similar. The concepts involved are particularly valuable ones to learn, even though daunting at first. There are good animation tutorials in the animation manual. Really just the opening door one is enough to learn the editor. I have done this tutorial more than once myself. The original creator did a really nice job on that step-by-step tutorial and really all of the ones in the manual.

 

[johnalexander1571]

I just realized I have an opening door in that animation.😁

[AsOne]

A "hack" is to use the walk tool to literally walk around the model, recording your screen while doing so.  A bit annoying with the little yellow feet on screen (I have a feature request to disable these as an option), but it works.  I do it all the time now to send clients walkthroughs.  On Mac you can use Quicktime.  It records audio as well, so if you want to narrate or add commentary you can do so.  You can record the entire screen or a portion of it.  I use Handbrake to reduce the size of the videos. 

[johnalexander1571]

Oh nice! That's a great idea.