Explore changes to the midterm submission for a Navisworks course, specifically the shift from submitting Navisworks files to submitting two types of animation files. Learn how to export animations as a series of still images in PNG format, a preferred format in today's construction world.
Key Insights
- The midterm submission for the Navisworks course at VDCI has changed from submitting Navisworks files to submitting two types of animation files. One is a metogate section animation created in lesson one and the other is based on the animation worked on in lesson three with descriptor and animator.
- The animations should be exported not as AVI files, but as a series of still images in PNG format. This is because AVI produces a low-quality video, not used in today's construction world.
- For exporting the animation, certain settings need to be updated. The format should be PNG, the resolution should be 1920 x 1080, and the frames per second (FPS) should be set to two. The animation will be saved as a series of frames, which will be zipped into a single file for submission.
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Hello, I hope you've been enjoying your Introduction to Navisworks course here at VDCI. I'm interrupting your course just briefly to discuss the midterm submission. We've historically submitted our Navisworks files in the midterm and final submissions, but we're changing that for this course.
We have already created one animation file in Lesson 1, and this was the Meadowgate section animation. We will be submitting this file as half of our midterm. We will also be submitting another type of animation for this course, and this will be based on the animation we've recently been working on with Scripter and Animator.
This is in Lesson 3, and I'm using the BIM 361 complete file, and you can see I have it open here. The first thing I want to do is uncheck the Enable Scripts button so I can focus on the animation, and I'll go over here to the Animator tab. We can see that I have my "Approach" animation, and if I select the word "Approach" here, I can hit Play, and we can see that this is the animation we’re going to submit as the second half of our midterm.
We approach the doors, the doors open because of our proximity, and we end up in the middle of the room, seeing all of our interior space. I would like to export this animation not as an AVI file, but instead as a series of still images. So let's go ahead and do this together.
I'll go to Export Animation. I'm going to choose the current Animator scene, and that will export my "Approach" scene. I'm going to render the viewport.
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My format will be PNG. We mentioned earlier in the course that AVI produces a video, but it is low quality and not necessarily the video type commonly used in today's construction world. So instead, we're going to use PNG.
I'm going to keep this as "Explicit, " but I'm going to change this to 1920 and 1080. You may have noticed that I already changed these, but please make sure to update your settings to match what I have here. You'll also notice that I have changed my FPS—that's frames per second—to 2. This is because, for this submission, we want to be able to see your images, but we don’t need too many images.
If you were exporting this to convert into a video in another software, I’d suggest more frames. But this is all we need for now. I'll hit OK, and you’ll see that it opens to my Lesson 3 folder.
Again, if you need to find your Lesson 3 folder, go to where it's saved. I've saved mine here: Lesson 3, and here, "bim361-complete-animator001." This will save a series of frames, and they’ll be named 001,002, and so on for the whole animation.
I’ll hit Save, and Navisworks will start generating those images. If I open my File Explorer, we’ll see the images starting to generate. It may seem like a lot of images, but again, since we chose 2 frames per second, we should be OK.
I’ll open up the first one while the rest are being generated, and I’ll slowly slide through them with my right mouse button. We can see that this is a basic representation of our animation. If I hold the right mouse button on my keyboard, the Windows Photo Viewer will show the animation. It’s kind of choppy, but it works fairly well.
We could bring this into another software like Photoshop in the future and turn it back into a movie, but for now, we’ll just submit the images. You can see it generated a total of 36 images for me. So what I’m going to do here in File Explorer is select the 36 images by holding Shift and clicking the first and the last one.
So I have 36 items selected. Then I’ll right-click, Send To, Compressed (zipped) Folder. It will zip all of those items into one zipped folder, and here, where it says "animator-00…" whatever number you have, replace that with your name: "bim361-complete-yournamepng-animation" or "bim361-complete-yourname-animation."
Okay, that'll create a zipped file. It’s a single file containing all of the images. Now, when you go to submit your midterm, please upload your AVI file from Lesson 1 and your Lesson 3 zipped file containing all of your images.
All right, I hope you've been enjoying this course, and I hope you enjoy the second half.