Discover the process of creating an animated scooter using specialized software, from setting up the animations for turning wheels and folding parts to finally making the scooter explode. Learn how to adjust settings to avoid animation errors and how to line up all the components to ensure a visually pleasing result.
Key Insights
- The animation begins by setting up the rotation of the wheels and adjusting the shadows to prevent unwanted effects. The wheels are moved independently to achieve a 180-degree rotation.
- The next step involves folding the scooter. This process requires careful selection of nine components, setting the right pivot point, and rotating the components. The animations are then aligned to avoid overlaps and inconsistencies.
- Finally, the scooter is made to explode, with the entire scooter selected and the 'Explode All Levels' option used. The explosion is adjusted to ensure that all components are visible on screen. The timeline of the animation is also adjusted to ensure smooth transitions between stages.
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Let's create our full animation. It will include the wheels turning on our scooter, then folding the scooter, and finally the scooter exploding. Sounds fun right? Let's jump in.
Let's begin by adjusting our view. First we want to set our playhead to 0,0, that safe place, then we can orbit our view until we're looking more or less at the side of our scooter. From there, we'll notice that we have a shadow for the scooter.
Now that shadow might start to get bouncy as the wheels turn, so let's go ahead and avoid that problem by turning off the shadows. We'll do that under display settings. We'll look for effects and uncheck ground shadow and ground reflection.
With all of that set up, let's move our playhead up to the 2 second mark. Now let's click on nothing, so nothing is selected, and go to the transform, transform components tool. Now we will select wheel 1, and we will notice this transformation gizmo has an outer circle.
We'll rotate that outer circle forward until we get to 180 degrees. Once we're at 180, we'll click OK. Let's again click on nothing, look for our transform components tool, and this time we'll select wheel 2 up in the front.
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We'll grab that same rotation circle and rotate it forward 180 degrees, and now we will click OK. With that, click away so that nothing is selected, and let's preview the results. Go down to the bottom of our area and click the play button, and look at those wheels turn.
Looks great, right? Now let's take our playhead and move it forward to the 4 second mark. We are now going to fold the scooter. Let's click so that nothing is selected, go to the transform components button, and we're going to select our components.
Now this part is very important to get right before moving on. So let's go ahead and select wheel 2, which is right in the front, then we will select grip 2 by holding CTRL or CMD on our keyboard, grip 1, still holding CTRL or CMD, handlebar, clamp, stem B, stem A, the neck, and the fork. We should see 9 components selected, and visually we'll see that everything has turned blue all the way down our stem.
Now we need to set our pivot point, so where it says set pivot, click that set pivot button. We're going for the hole we created on our neck. It's right about there.
We hover over it with our cursor, and we want our transformation gizmo to have its front arrow pointed directly forward, its up arrow pointed directly up, so we're not getting any weird diagonals. Once we're happy with that, we'll click one time, and immediately click the set pivot green checkbox. That locks it in.
Now we can rotate all of that stem backwards. We'll use the rotate circle again and pull it back 75 degrees. Once that's looking good, we'll go ahead and click OK.
Fusion needs a moment to think, and then let's go ahead and expand our timeline by hovering over its top line and dragging it up. We'll notice that all of these 9 components now have an animation associated with them, but the downside is Fusion overlaps those animations, and that can cause weird results. So let's grab the left side of each one of our new motion animations and drag it until it lines up with the top line.
You'll notice as I'm doing this, I get a blue dashed line that helps me align all of those actions. I would prioritize aligning everything with that blue line and not worry too much about the number readout that it gives us. All the way down, we want everything to line up so that at the end of the day, everything on our folding operation begins around the 2 second mark and ends around the 4 second mark.
With that, let's go ahead and click the play button to watch the animation. Wheels turn first, and then the scooter folds. That looks really good.
Let's fold it back open by first moving our playhead up to the 6 second mark. Then we'll click so that nothing is selected and reduce the size of our timeline again to give us more space to work. Now we can go back to our Transform and select Transform Components.
We want to select that wheel 2 in the front, hold CTRL or CMD and grab both grips, the handlebar, clamp, both stems, the neck and the fork, giving us 9 items. Now we want to select that same pivot. We'll click the Set Pivot button, hover over the hole through the bottom of the neck.
Once it looks good with the front arrow facing forward and the top arrow facing straight up, we will click one time and then click the green Set Pivot button. Now we want to rotate all of that forward to minus 75 degrees. Once we're there at minus 75 degrees, we'll click OK.
Now this time it's easy because everything lines up starting at 4 seconds, ending at 6 seconds. So let's click the Play button to see the results. Wheels turn, scooter folds down, scooter folds open.
Now are you ready to explode this scooter? I know I am. Let's go ahead and first move our timeline up to the 8 second mark. From there we'll have nothing selected and then hover over the top line of our components.
It should be our Fusion 101 scooter with your first and last name. Click that one time. That selects the entire scooter.
Now we can go up to the Transform menu and click on Explode All Levels. Click that one time. If we wait a moment, we'll notice that Fusion does indeed explode everything.
We get this little tiny bar menu. Let's look at the options. The first is One Step Explosion versus Sequential Explosion.
We want One Step. That means everything explodes at the same time. We do not want to turn on the trail lines because they're going to look funny.
Because we've already done a lot of folding and rotating, the trail lines may not look so good. The next is a slider bar and we can adjust the explosion scale. I recommend exploding this but not so far that things go way off screen where we can't see them.
Once we're happy with that, click the green OK button. Let's preview our results. Click the Play button.
We're seeing that the wheels turn, folds down, folds up, a little bit of a space, and then everything explodes. That looks pretty good minus that little space. Let's open up our animation timeline and make a few adjustments.
Let's simply drag each of these motions back to an alignment. Pretty straightforward. I'm just going to drag everything back until it aligns.
All the way down, every component. Once we have that alignment, let's drag the right side up to the 8 second mark. Repeat that for all of these.
All go to 8 seconds. It's a little bit tedious but we want to make sure we don't miss any component. We'll drag everything until it aligns where they start the explosion at 6 seconds and it continues until 8 seconds.
It does take Fusion a little bit of thinking power so be sure to be patient as you do this. Sometimes it's good to wait while Fusion thinks about each movement. With that, go ahead and click the play button to view the result.
Wheels turn, folds down, folds up, and then explodes. Pretty cool. Let's go ahead and bring that animation timeline down so it's a bit smaller.
Everything looks really good. Let's go ahead and be really cool and add a view animation. Right here at 8 seconds, we're going to rotate the view.
Grab the view cube, grab the corner, and drag it straight to the left to rotate that view. Until it's almost facing forward. Then I'll let go.
Now that gives me a view line at the very top of my animation timeline. I'm going to take and drag the left side of that all the way back to 0 so that the view changes throughout the entire animation. Let's go ahead and click play to see the result.
Wheels are spinning, the overall model is rotating very slowly, and then it explodes. So that's it! Now let's publish this animation. Up at the top, there's a publish button.
Click on publish video. For video scope, it's set to all storyboards, which is fine because we've only created one storyboard so far. The video resolution might be set to current document window size.
Let's change that. Let's drop it down to 1280x1024. With that, go ahead and click OK.
You can save it to my computer or a project in the cloud. It's up to you if you'd like to save it to a project in the cloud, but be sure to change the name to Fusion 101 Scooter. Your first name, last name, and then call it Animation.
And then you'll want to click the box to save it to your computer and save it to a location that you know where it is, so that you can then upload it to the class. Go ahead and click save. That will publish the video.
And once it's complete, go ahead and click the Fusion save button.
