Chapter 33: Animating with MotionManager
If you are making a long animation that covers a long period of time, say more than 30 seconds,
the key points may be close together and difficult to distinguish from one another. You can use the
zoom tools in the lower-right corner of the timeline area to zoom the timeline in or out. Zooming
in makes the key points appear further away from one another, enabling you to select one that
might be right on top of another.Other mistakes or animation problems will also come up, such as parts that don’t move correctly.
In most of these situations, the fastest way to deal with them is to delete the problem key points
and re-create them. Troubleshooting some errors tends to be fruitless and takes longer than re-cre-
ation.Using paths to control cameras
I introduced cameras in Chapter 5, so I will not go through the general details again. You might
want to refer back to brush up on some of the controls. The main controls you need for animations
are Target by selection, Position by selection, and Set roll by selection, in addition to the Field of
View settings.
The main weakness of the Rotate Animation Wizard is that it rotates about the screen axis. When I
first saw the part rotate that way, I wondered how I could change it. It isn’t as easy as maybe it
ought to be, but once you understand the process, you can make it as simple as you need to make
it. I will use the example of making the camera revolve around the axis of a part regardless of the
orientation of the part as the example of how to drive a camera along a path. You can make this
process as simple or as complex as you need to. I will start simple and make it gradually more
complex.To state the problem explicitly, rotating the view around the axis of the screen the way the Rotate
Animation Wizard does it makes the part look like it is wobbling in space, or spinning while dan-
gling from a string. It doesn’t look like it is sitting on a turntable and the table is rotating, which I
would guess is the effect most people are looking for. In order to spin the view around the part
axis, make a path on a plane perpendicular to the axis, and draw some sort of a path on it.Starting with the robot assembly from the CD-ROM (Chapter 33 Robot Assembly.sldasm),
move to a top view, and open a 3D sketch. When doing prep work like this, it is better if you can
work using the Model tab, instead of the MotionManager. This prevents you from creating any
unnecessary key points for animatable items.In the 3D sketch, from the Top view, draw a four-point closed loop spline, as shown in Figure
33.11. The reason I’ve created this in a 3D sketch is so that I can change the path to a non-planar
path if I want to.