Explore the fundamentals of the Animator tool in Navisworks. Discover how to locate, activate, and utilize this tool to create simple animations within the software.
Key Insights
- The Animator tool, found under the Animation tab, offers a more precise and controllable mode of animation compared to Viewpoint animations. It allows for the animation of objects as well as cameras.
- The tool features a range of playback options such as rewind, pause, stop, and forward. It also has a scrubber for skipping through animations manually, and diamonds representing keyframes for marking property or position assignments.
- The Animator tool also includes the Capture Keyframe tool and the Translate tools for capturing and modifying animations. The Scripter tool enables object automation and works in conjunction with the Animator tool for refining animations.
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Welcome back to the Navisworks video series. In this video we'll be covering Animator, at least an introduction to Animator. I'll be going over the basics of the tool, where to find it, how to turn it on, and how to play a simple animation.
And in later videos we'll be discussing how to make these animations using the Animator tool. So let's start with a quick overview of the Animator tool. You'll find it in the Animation tab called Animator.
You can actually click this button on and you'll see the Animator pop up, or you can go over to the Home tab and turn on the Animator tool from the Tools panel. So the Animator tool is different from the Viewpoint animations. It's a much more accurate, much more controllable type of animation than those two will allow you to make.
You can also animate objects with this tool, as well as cameras. So let's start making a quick look at this tool. When you start the Animator tool, you'll see that it's potentially docked down in the bottom of your Scene panel.
If you'd like, and I recommend this, it's better to have the timeline a little bit longer. If you undock it and then dock it with the entire bottom of your screen, then you'll have a much larger stage for your scrubber. You'll notice that Animator has the proper playback tools that you'll see in the other types of animation.
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You have Rewind to Start, you have Step Back 1, you have Reverse Play, Pause, Stop, Forward Play, Step Forward, and Skip to End. You'll see that you can have multiple scenes, and within each scene you can have one camera and multiple objects animations. You can skip to any time that you want using the timeline or time position, but you see that your scrubber actually skips to, and you type it in here exactly.
You can also skip to different times by simply dragging the scrubber, and that's what this black vertical bar with a triangle on top is called. You'll see that on my screen, as I move this scrubber back and forth, that my animation moves forward and backward manually. Inside of the timeline, you'll see these black diamonds and colored areas between those diamonds.
The black diamonds are actually keyframes, and keyframes mark properties or a position of whatever object you have that keyframe assigned to. So for example, this diamond assigns this camera this exact position, and then this keyframe assigns this camera this position, and each of these other keyframes are assigned to the animation set 1 and 2, which are actually the doors, and those allow the doors to open and then close. We've been making a simple animation including the camera, and I'll play it back right now.
The camera will move forward into the building, opening the doors, and then we'll turn around and view the space, and then as we turn around, we see the doors close, and then the entirely close, and our animation stops. We'll be using these tools to accomplish this, the Capture Keyframe tool and the Translate tools on the top left, and then we'll be looking at the Scripter tool, which is the other side of Animator. It allows for object automation and how that works with the Animator tool, and then we'll be exporting our animation and modifying it as we aim to perfect the way that it looks, and all that's coming up in the next few videos.