Discover how to create viewpoint animations in Navisworks using the Bath City model. This article breaks down two types of animations: frame-by-frame and viewpoint-exclusive animations.
Key Insights
- The article explains how to create a frame-by-frame animation in Navisworks where the software records every move made and saves them as frames.
- It also discusses a smoother, viewpoint-exclusive animation type that involves using two viewpoints and allows Navisworks to stitch them together, creating frames in between.
- The article also notes the ability to add multiple viewpoints to an animation and highlights the process of adjusting the animation duration and order of viewpoints.
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Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video I'll be covering Viewpoint Animations. We'll be using the Bath City Complete model.
If you go to the Open button in your Lesson 1 folder, select Bath City, and then make sure your Files of Type are set to All Files. Find the BathCityComplete.nwf model and select Open. There are a few types of animations that you can make in Navisworks.
The first two are both Viewpoint Animation types, and the most basic of which is a Frame-by-Frame animation. With a Frame-by-Frame animation, Navisworks records every move that you make and then saves all of those moves as frames which you can play back. To start making a Frame-by-Frame animation, you'll want to start with a view that you have previously set up.
In this case, we'll be using the Abbey view. Now this animation is very quick to make, very easy. All you have to do is select the Walk tool first.
The reason I selected that is because I want to walk around this abbey. Next, in the Animation tab, select Record, and as soon as you hit this button, Navisworks is recording every step. So I'm going to wander around my streets, flying around a little bit, and I can end up on a view of the abbey like so.
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And once you're satisfied with capturing everything you need to, you just click the Record button again to turn that Record feature off. Navisworks stops recording your every move and saves an animation for you. You can tell it's an animation because it has a slightly different logo.
Remember the Viewpoints have this box logo—this is a perspective. The animations look like film strips. So let's rename this Animation One to Walking Around Abbey, and you'll see that if you expand this Walking Around Abbey that I have a number of frames, and these are all of the steps that I made.
If you'd like to play back your animation, first select the animation, and then in your Animation tab select the Play button. You'll see that it's playing back almost verbatim every move that I made, and the moves that I made were not exactly smooth, but I was able to record that real time in a matter of seconds. So those are the benefits and drawbacks of using the Frame-by-Frame animation.
One, it's quick, but it's not that good looking. The second type of Viewpoint Animation uses Viewpoints exclusively, and it turns out to be a little smoother than the Frame-by-Frame animation. The only thing you need to do to start with in a Viewpoint Animation are two Viewpoints.
Let's start with the Abbey view once again. Select the Walk tool and use the center mouse button to go up in elevation, and then tilt down to look down at your abbey. We have a view that is something like this.
Once you have that view, you can right-click on your Saved Viewpoints panel and go to Save Viewpoints. You can call this view Animation Abbey One. Next, let's select the Plan Viewpoint.
Right-click on that and then go to Add Copy, and then move this Viewpoint down next to your Animation Abbey One. You can rename this to be Animation Plan. Next, let's create our animation.
You'll just want to right-click on the Saved Viewpoints panel and then go to Add Animation, and you'll see that now I have something that looks like a Viewpoint with a film strip next to it. But if you notice, there's no expand/collapse button next to my film strip logo. That's because this animation is currently empty.
So let's call this Animation Abbey. Next, let's select both of the Viewpoints that we created. I'm holding down Shift as I select both of them and then drag those two Viewpoints into the animation.
Order is important, so make sure that Animation Plan is first and Animation Abbey One is second. Next, you can select your Animation Abbey animation, and then you can select Play on the Playback panel, and you'll see that Navisworks is actually stitching those two Viewpoints together, and it's doing the math for us and creating all of the frames in between Animation Plan and Animation Abbey One, and it's going very slow. We already know that this is going much slower than we want it to, so why don't you just stop on the Playback panel, and we can change the length of this animation by right-clicking on it and then going to Edit, and we'll see that our duration was 46.7 seconds, which is a long time when it comes to animation.
Let's change it to 15, then select your Animation Abbey one more time and hit Play. See, that's working much faster. If you'd like, you can play this animation backwards by hitting the Reverse Play button.
If you'd like this animation to permanently be reversed, then what you'll do is you'll change the order of your Viewpoints so that Abbey One is first and Plan is second. Now our animation starts with Abbey One and ends with Plan, but I don't want it to be this way, so I'm just going to move it back to where it was. You'll notice that I was struggling with moving the order of these.
You'll struggle with it too. It's just a problem with the program. We have the ability to add Viewpoints to this animation as well.
It's not just two Viewpoints. You can put as many as you want in there, and I'm going to start with my Animation Abbey One Viewpoint, and I'm going to round this abbey so that I'm seeing the backside of it, and then I'll save this Viewpoint. I'll call this Animation Abbey Two.
Now let's take this new Viewpoint and place it within our animation. Now we have Plan, Abbey One, Abbey Two, and then right-click on the animation and go to Edit. You'll see that our duration has increased because it's taking into account the new Viewpoint, and let's move that back down to 15 where we want it.
Once you're ready, hit Play. So once it gets to the second Viewpoint, it's going to immediately go to a transition between the second Viewpoint and the third, and that's about as easy as it is. That's how to make a standard and basic animation.
In upcoming videos, we'll be covering how to include sections within those animations and how to animate objects, as well as how to use the Animator tool in the program. That concludes this video. Thank you for watching.