Discover the science of animating objects in Navisworks through their comprehensive video series. This article will guide you through the process of animating doors, from setting the rotation gizmo to copying keyframes for smooth door movements.
Key Insights
- The animator tool in Navisworks can be used to animate objects such as doors within a 3D model. The process includes selecting the object to be animated, adding an animation set, and setting up keyframes to control the object's movements.
- Setting up the rotation gizmo correctly is crucial for a successful animation. The gizmo should be placed at the hinge point of the door to ensure it swings open and closed correctly. Failing to set the gizmo at the correct location can cause the door to come off its hinge during animation.
- Keyframes are used to control the object's movements over time. After creating the initial open and close movements, these keyframes can be copied and reused to create a seamless animation of a door opening and closing as the viewer approaches and passes through it.
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Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video I'll be covering the Animator tool, and this time we'll be animating objects. We'll be using the BIM 361 complete model.
If you don't have that open, go to your Lesson 3 folder, and the file is called BIM361Complete.nwf. When you open your file, you should have Animator open. If you don't, make sure you just open the Animator panel. And so far we have a camera animation, and we're going to animate these doors to open as we approach them so we don't simply crash through them like we've been doing so far.
They will open right about that time, and then when we get to the end, I'll show you how to simply close them at the end. So within our approach scene, we're going to have two what are called animation sets, and these are going to be below the camera animation set. But first we have to tell Navisworks which objects we want to animate.
So let's go close to these doors and have a good view of them. It's okay because our whole animation is going to save the original position as well as our viewpoint. Now let's use the Select tool.
You can find it in your Quick Launch, or you can go to the Home tab and select that Left Door. And the door contains the handle as well. If your selection resolution is set to geometry, then it will pick the glass or the handle, but we want to make sure that our last object is our selection resolution here.
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Once you have that selected, you want to right-click on approach and then go to Add Animation Set from Current Selection. This one's called Left Door. Next, we want to do the same thing with the Right Door, and then right-click on approach, Add Animation Set from Current Selection.
Right Door. Next, we're going to turn the camera off for now, and this helps us to edit the other animation sets that are within the same scene since if we move the scrubber now with the camera checked on, then the camera is going to move and mess us up. If we uncheck that camera then move the scrubber, we'll see that now we are independent of that camera just temporarily.
So make sure you're back at the beginning. This should read zero seconds, and select the Left Door animation set. You want to turn on your Translate Animation Set, and we're going to use the Rotate tool.
Once you turn on the Rotate tool, you'll see that your Rotate gizmo turns on, and this is a very important step. You want to make sure that the center of rotation for your door is set at the hinge before you set your first keyframe. When you set your keyframe, it actually records the position of this gizmo, and I'm just going to demonstrate.
I do not want you to do this. If I set my keyframe now and then move my scrubber and then rotate or move the center of the rotation and capture that keyframe, then if you scrub you'll see that the gizmo actually moves and that's going to cause a problem. If, for example, I rotate my door 90 and then capture that keyframe, we'll see that the door actually comes off of its hinge.
That is not what we want. So I'm going to delete that keyframe, and I may as well just delete this keyframe. Yeah, so first thing we'll do is to move this gizmo to the hinge, and you'll feel it kind of snap to the edge.
If you get really close, you can actually see that snapping occur. You should be right on the hinge. Once you get it into a good position, then you just want to capture the keyframe and then move your scrubber to the right a little bit.
Actually, I'm going to move it to about two seconds and then rotate your gizmo in the X direction and capture that keyframe. Now we'll see that that door is rotating about the hinge and it takes about two seconds to do that. The time we can always change, but we're going to match it with the camera.
The next thing we need to do is the same thing with the Right Door. So let's move the scrubber back to the initial position and then select Right Door, and you want to move this gizmo to the hinge, capture that keyframe, and then move your scrubber over to the two-second mark and then rotate 90. Now you can capture keyframe again, and let's move the scrubber back and forth and make sure that we got the right animation.
It looks good, and we can turn off the gizmo by selecting the Rotate tool one more time. Great, now the next step is to turn on the camera. Now our camera's active, we know exactly where our animation is going to be as the doors are open, and that actually does not look too bad.
We approach the doors, the doors open, and we move through them. The camera rotates, and then the last step is that we want the doors to close behind us. The doors closing are the easy part because we already have done all the work.
So instead of turning on the gizmo again and then rotating the doors closed, what we can do is we can copy keyframes. So first we want to copy the keyframe of the Left Door closed, and just for safety, I'm going to turn off the camera so that we're not locked far away in the distance. So I'm selecting Left Door, I'm going to right-click on the first keyframe of the Left Door, and I'm going to select Copy.
And then the scrubber, move all the way to the end and right-click and go to Paste. Now I'll do the same thing with the Right Door, the closed position, Copy, and then right-click and Paste. Now let's take the second keyframe which is when the door is completely open, right-click, Copy, and then right-click on the position that you want to set it and Paste.
And the same thing with the Right Door. So what's happening between the open and open position is absolutely nothing because these contain the same information as each other. And then the door is closed; it's doing its own animation between this position and the final position.
So let's turn on the camera again and check it out. I'm going to rewind all the way and hit play. So the doors open, worked fine, and let's see if our doors closing looks fine as well.
They start to close as we see them, and they're fully closed at the end. Cool. And that will conclude our basic object animation, and we'll be continuing Animator in the next video.
So thank you, and I hope you enjoyed.