Discover how to create an engaging animation to demonstrate the functionality of a scooter. Learn how to navigate the animation workspace, manipulate the timeline, and implement camera and component changes to bring your animation to life.
Key Insights
- The animation workspace features a timeline at the bottom of the screen, with each number representing the number of seconds in the animation. Users can adjust the playhead on the timeline to record changes as part of the animation.
- Two types of changes can be made in the animation workspace: camera changes, which alter the viewer's perspective, and component changes, which allow for the rotation and movement of the scooter's components.
- After making adjustments and transformations, users can preview the animation by clicking the play button. This allows them to view the changes in real time and make further edits as required.
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Now let's create an animation to showcase the functionality of our scooter. Let's start by exploring the animation workspace. Change from the render workspace over to animation.
Let's take a look at the screen. Across the bottom we have what's called the animation timeline. We'll notice that we have this timeline bar across the bottom with numbers.
Each number represents the number of seconds in the animation. Next we'll notice that we have a playhead. We can drag that up and down the timeline.
Let's go ahead and drag that to the four second mark. Once you've hovered over four seconds you can let go and it will remain there. Now what happens is we adjust our playhead to whatever second time we want and then we make a change and Fusion records that as an animation.
There are two types of changes. One is a camera change, meaning what view we're looking at, and number two there are component changes. We can rotate and move the components.
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Let's make a camera change first. So with that timeline hovered over four, we're going to go ahead and orbit our view. I'll grab the middle of ViewCube here and drag to simply orbit the view to the other side and then let go.
What happens is I now have a camera or view motion right here in my timeline. Let's click the play button to preview that motion. So there it is.
The scooter components stay fixed but the camera rotates around. Pretty cool right? Let's go ahead and add another transformation. We're here at the four second mark still and now we can go to the transform area and click the transform components button.
Now let's click the grip, one of these grips. So the black grip. I'll click it and I get this transformation gizmo.
There are orbit circles or rotate circles. That won't really do much because the grip is already around. It won't visualize as rotating but I do have these move arrows.
If I grab the move arrow to pull it out of the handlebar that will create an animation. I can also have some fun here and turn on trail line visibility and click okay. With that let's go ahead and click the play button and see the result.
So the scooter rotates at the same time one of those handlebar grips flies off of its home location. Pretty fun. So I think we're ready to go ahead and create our actual animation but to get ready for that let's delete what we've already done.
We can click on that view animation, right click, and click delete. Then click on the grip animation, right click, and also select delete. And we'll move our playhead back to that zero zero location which is kind of a safe zone that lets us pivot our view without fusion recording a motion.
So let's rotate our view, pivot it back more or less to where we started, and click that save button.
